Willing and Nabal

"A Lone Star Christmas" returned this morning as you can see above, and it was a pretty fun morning!  Maddie was helping to tell the story of Abigail, David, and a guy named "Nabal," which means "fool."  Mom prepared this big feast here, just as Abigail did, and we had the stick horses ready to ride too.  David was on his way to put a whoopin' on Nabal until he saw that Thanksgiving-style feast that Abigail had prepared, and everyone learned it took effort to make peace, but it's worth it.

After church we were racing over to Pearce Auditorium, returning once again to see "The Nutcracker" there, the newer version by Gainesville Ballet.  The production itself was great, returning to some of the more traditional elements of the story that weren't present before - for many years, Gainesville hasn't had an actual Nutcracker costumed figure fighting against a Rat King and his minions.  This production did have that, and it was fun to see.  Everyone worked hard, and we remembered the days of practice and effort and costumes and tech week and all that... the end product was wonderful.

We ate some Wendy's on our way to the ballet, just because we had little time.  At church we had this meeting about our own upcoming Christmas productions, and that sort of ate up a good bit of time.  Anyway, we got home late afternoon and relaxed somewhat, although Mom was having to do laundry - washing shepherd costumes, for example.  The shepherds were out watching their flocks by night by the fire, and their costumes smelt like a campfire.  

We've been enjoying some leftover ham from Friday's preschool Thanksgiving event, something Mom can eat with out incident.  And so the topic of Honeybaked Ham came up, and how that would be a fun theme for a romantic Christmas comedy.  Maddie had the plot all there, in fact.  The ham conversation made us think of another Christmas movie, and so tonight we saw "Christmas with the Kranks" once more, watching poor Nora Krank struggle with that Hickory ham.  So much struggle and loss and pain and humiliation and lack of justice and ... no Hickory ham.  And yet, everything works out of course.  She gets the Hickory ham in the end, as it is brought in by a guest to the party that she invited at the last minute.  It's such a picture of life sometimes - things can be such a struggle at times, and in fact look pretty bleak.  Yet, in the end, it all works out somehow, and frequently in ways we don't see coming.  

We closed out the day with reading from "Wintersmith."  I'm moving forward in Genesis with this more intensive commentary.  Maddie makes sure of that, asking each day where I'm at.  Genesis 7 right now.  Did you know they waited a week inside the ark before the flood came?  And from what is in 7:13, it says the day they went into the ark is when things got rough outside, so my thinking is that things got rough somewhere else first, where the fountains of the deep were opening up... and a week later is when Noah's ark went for a little cruise.

After prayers tonight, we were off to sleep.  It's easy to sleep after full days like this!