'Twas the night before Christmas.

By the time 11:30pm had rolled around and my family had nestled themselves upstairs and I was all alone (listening to the Judd's, of course), I took a deep breath. The day had been filled with my mom reconnecting with Audrey Anne, making breakfast for the gang, doing more sprucing and the last touches of decorating, my dad making a gourmet key lime cheesecake with a key lime custard layer (scrumptious!), me making crabcakes for the first time and getting all confused about whether or not I needed sauerkraut or horseradish (my family won't let me live it down), I also now understand why they charge so darn much in restaurants for crab cakes--time intensive and many, many ingredients, driving down to Evanston in a rush to then have dinner with the Martens in the Doo's home (another story), and then I realized that I was too overwhelmed and tired--still needing to wrap some gifts and all the stocking stuffers (which were many), so we opted out of going to the Christmas Eve candlelight service and heading home. (You are suppose to sigh here out of exhaustion from reading the above.)
So, by the time 11:30pm arrived and all was quiet, my soul could hear God's Spirit just a wee bit. I could feel him calling me to him. Doesn't it sometimes feel like during Christmas we try to muster up some emotional connection to the story of Jesus being born and it never seems to work right and you are left feeling kind of jipped and disappointed? I guess in that moment of quietness I connected to Jesus the baby, God made flesh and was thankful and delighted. It really was just a flicker of recognition. Nothing profound, soul shaking or emotionally hyped. Just quietness for a moment. God's Spirit wouldn't let the holiday blur passed me without me being able to see for a flicker of a moment what it was all really about. I was thankful.
I love going to bed on Christmas eve with the house all cozy and warm, the decorations all festive and everything feeling ready. The last thing to be done before I went to bed was hang Audrey's stocking. My mom made a stocking for her but accidently left it in California on her couch. Bummer. But she whipped up another one in no time at all. Can you guess which one is Audrey's? I will give you a hint: she could fit into it. So it's a little on the big side. That's not such a bad thing when it comes to Christmas stockings. More room for more presents, right?