And on the 12th day of Christmas....

Today officially ends the Christmas season, marking the last of the 12 Days of Christmas, and tomorrow will be Epiphany. This year, for the 12 Days of Christmas, we decided to focus on giving gifts to Jesus. I read an idea another family did,* and decided to try and tweak it for this. So the kids and Pete and I pooled our money together a couple of weeks ago and decided to try and buy some gifts that Jesus would like each day. We weren't entirely consistent with that, though... some days got skipped... but we tried. To keep it simple, we just perused the Samaritan's Purse catalog, and everyone got to take turns picking out items within our daily budgeted amount.

As I looked at our collective random list tonight, it suddenly occurred to me that it would be very cool to hear Jesus sing, "On the 12th day of Christmas, my true loves gave to me...." followed by a long list of all the things given in His name to the people who need it. Maybe some year we'll try to parallel that song more.... Our current list does have "12 chicks" and "a fruit tree" (like a pear tree, minus the partridge?), "2 soccer balls," etc. :)

Speaking of gifts for Christmas, though, I'll record one I did NOT receive, neither for Christmas, nor any of the 12 days thereafter:


In fact, at around 4:30 am on any particular morning in our house, you may not find Frankincense, but you may find a Frank Incensed!

Since both Pete and I will be working tomorrow which means we won't have a lot of family time, we decided to celebrate part of Epiphany early tonight. The kids were excited to find 2 gifts mysteriously on our doorstep (one from Grandpa and Gee-Gee-- thank you!!) tonight, and we talked about the Magi in the Christmas story. Tomorrow we'll do the "chalking of the door," a tradition that we first were introduced to with the Cole family last year.

And THEN Christmas will be over.

Actually, no, not quite for us. For some reason our church leadership Christmas party has been scheduled for this coming Friday night. Somehow that feels weird... Will I really want to don Christmas apparel once again? It may feel like the seventy-eleventh day of Christmas by then.



*This is the only blog I read written by a person I don't know.... and I think it is truly inspiring. I go through stages periodically in which I was much, much more like the writer. And the rest of the time, I just wish I was much more like her.