A Christmas to "Treasure"

My mom, being the ever energetic, creative person that she is, actually came up with a theme for our extended family Christmas this year. As we walked in her house on Christmas Eve, we received this hand-out:

And it lived up to all it promised!

Here are some of the treasured moments for me:

**Family blessing time. This year Mom made a whole board with various jewels or precious metals on it, corresponding to cards in her Treasure Box that had individual blessings for each member of the family, based on Proverbs. It was a very meaningful time that we're all grateful for; Mom and Dad said and prayed really cool things over each of us. Only Strider (and perhaps Uncle John?) was perplexed by the occasional tears.


**Treasure Hunt. Dad cooked up a big game for us all to play, to discover what the gift was that Mom and Dad were giving each of us couples. It involved 35 clues hidden all around the house, with such hints as "Peace" or "Book of Paul." They were tough enough to keep us all hunting for quite a long time. Then, when we had found most of them we were supposed to be able to unscramble all the letters to reveal the message. Due to a missing open parenthesis and an entirely illogical phrase, from a grammar perspective, this proved to be much harder than we expected. But, with a combined, team effort, we finally figured it out, and were very pleased to hear that we can all have another stay at the Sonshine Inn this year!

**Book Discussion. We all had assigned reading this past month: Crazy Love by Francis Chan. It was good to have a group of people to discuss this very challenging book with, and we all lamented our weaknesses in our passion for Jesus. Hopefully some of the things we discussed and learned will stay with us and encourage us in some new behaviors and thoughts.

**A visit from Grandma Deuce. As Karin says, we might be the only family who has a Christmas tradition involving an uncle dressing up as an octogenarian female, but, hey, it's fun for the kids. Or is it? We've realized there is a very small window of ages for which this actually works. Most of the kids are either too scared, or too "smart" to fully appreciate the beauty. This year, when Grandma Deuce walked in, Rayna's only question was "Why are you wearing glasses?" (Never mind the wig, weird clothes, high heels, etc...)

**Fun gifts. One of the jokes this year was a sweatshirt for Dad. He's been teased for years now because he often asks for the same (strange) gift: "a sweatshirt with a nice design." He also gets teased because he signs his emails with the signature, "Warmest regards, Bruce." So this year when Pete (who had drawn Dad's name for the gift exchange) received the email saying he would like, among other things, "... a sweatshirt with a nice design on it. Warmest regards, Bruce." So that's what he got!

(Front says "Nice design" and back says "Warmest Regards, Bruce"
Even funnier than the sweatshirt, though, are Mom's and Graham's reactions in the above picture!

**Baby name discussion. After putting up with innumerable family conversations in years past about how Pete and I should name our babies "Ballpark" or "Hank" or other such ridiculous things, I was more than happy to lead a discussion about what another family member should choose for a baby name -- specifically, for John and Keiko's expected one. I suggested they could name it Porter, after our grandfather. And then they could use John's name for the middle name. It took John a few minutes to process this, but he eventually declared he would not be naming his baby after a portable toilet.

Keiko, meanwhile, was adamantly declaring that she wanted NO input from any of us, and there was NO way this child would have 2 American names. She said the baby will have one Japanese name and one English name. Pete asked for an example of this, and James quickly offered, "You mean like 'Bob Samurai?'" Maybe I'd just had too much wine, but this struck me as immensely funny. This name stuck, much to John and Keiko's dismay, eventually even being shortened to little Baby BS. They should have just accepted Porter John. :)

**And speaking of "Bob"... Under the category of "talking it to death," the guys in the family all had repeated conversations about where their Men-only breakfast would be on the 26th... circling around the conclusion that it would be at Bob Evans about 400 times. It got WAY less funny as time went on.

**And speaking of redundancy... All the way to Huntersville and back in our van, we listened to Andrew Peterson's song about the genealogy of Jesus. The same track over and over. The kids kept begging for "one more time!" Who knew the Begats were so fascinating?

So, yes, there was much to treasure from this Christmas. Thank you, Jesus, for all the great memories You gave us on Your birthday!