A Lone Star Christmas

Jingle Bells was showing a bit of his mischievous side with a new way to decorate the tree upstairs.  If you look closely, yes it's underwear.  The elf had raided Madison's top drawer to find all kinds of new "ornaments."  As you might suspect, Madison loved it.  We'll hear about this one for a while.

The morning continued though, and we finally got around to starting our new Christmas-themed series, "A Lone Star Christmas."

The set was decorated yesterday, along with the display case - both looked fantastic, with a mix of Christmas cheer thrown into the Old West.  You can see above that even the cactus were decorated.

The skit was a great one too:

It was based on an old Johnny Cash song I heard about a "Christmas Guest."  Our main character Nerdo here has made some chili for his Christmas guest.  Of course, the whole thing is based on the message of the day about doing things "for the least of these," which is in fact doing things for Jesus.  Madison and the other children enjoyed the morning service, with great Christmas videos, Christmas songs, our skit, and the first message in the booklet.  Oh, and those booklets:  they arrived at 10:30 pm Friday night at the church during practice for the Christmas play.  Talk about last minute!  Daddy worked hard to get them, and we were proud to start a new series today despite all the other activities going on.  Sure, it's just taking the western set and decorating it for Christmas.  But we wanted to take it a step further and make something greater out of it too.  I think we did that this morning.

Anyway, the big story of the rest of the day would be our play, "Wrapping All the Way."  Honestly, Mommy worked harder than most of the folks on this, doing costumes for all these kids.  She shopped, she sewed, she repaired... she got all the props too.  Jason did our set - he's the guy who makes our KidPak sets too.  The production turned out really well, and got a lot of positive feedback.  The kids were fantastic too.  Madison sat with a few friends at church, while Daddy sat in the soundbooth and Mommy was racing about backstage for all kinds of reasons.

But it all turned out well.  And that set you see up there?  All gone.  Just like that, they had to take it down in order to set things up for a graduation service in the morning.  Crazy, huh?

Speaking of 'crazy,' there has been nonstop rain all of the sudden.  It put a damper on some of the festivities of the night, although we managed to do everything inside for the most part.  One thing we had set up outside under the awning was Santa, in a sleigh, with live reindeer.  This was pretty cool - we waited in line with some friends, and Madison posed for a picture in the sleigh.

We got home at a reasonable hour tonight.  We thought about going to see the Festival of the Nativities again this year, but we just didn't have time this weekend with practices and Nutcracker performances.  Oh well - we'll catch it next time hopefully.  We'll see about that!  Things are definitely getting busier.

Tonight we went to bed reading our new "Lone Star Christmas" devotional, and getting to bed early.  Everyone is exhausted, and understandably so.  The saying this weekend was "TGIM."  Yes, tomorrow we'll be saying, "Thank God it's Monday!"