Merry Christmas!

We hope you have had a Christmas season full of wonder and happiness this year. The Preacher & his wife agree... this was the best Christmas yet for the Christiansens. Gratitude, joy & discovery have been abundant.

So when we last left you we had just gotten 17 inches of snow in 24 hours. Well...we have had 2 more heavy snowfalls and apparently this December is the absolute snowiest on record. Awesome. 33.4 inches or something insane like that. Why do we live here? Funniest part is that this week there are 2 more snow storms heading our way. No one is making accumulation predictions yet, but we're already snow-weary. The preacher is thinking SERIOUSLY about investing in a snowblower. The kiddos have had respiratory junk for the last 3 weeks so they haven't been out in it since our last post (we take deep breaths- but so far we haven't lost our minds yet with worry). Hopefully soon! There are some seriously cool snowforts in the neighborhood!

At church we were busy getting ready for Christmas. We held a big event to collect, wrap, & deliver presents to a local women's domestic violence shelter & throw a big Christmas party for them. It is a ton of work, requiring an amazing amount of volunteer help, but it is also so very rewarding. We also worked on building the large spirit figures (giant puppets of the main characters of the nativity) that have been used all advent. They are mega cool...and by mega cool I mean uber-amazing. I'm not so artsy fartsy, but I have really enjoyed being a small part of these figures' creation. Good stuff.

We also enjoyed all of our Christmas celebrations...

1) "Christiansen Christmas" which is a bowling & eating extravaganza with a dirty santa main event with all of Tyler's aunts & uncles & their families. Greta enjoyed her bowling debut and really loved putting barney & reindeer down the kiddie bowling ball ramp. Tyler won the bowling tourney and received the coveted jankey angel trophy.

2) White Elephant Gifts with the Walens...everyone tries their best to avoid "Faja Christmas" (trust me, you don't want him on your mantle in December) and other kooky gifts (pooping Dog sign, stinky candles, etc). We don't bother with a meal...we just bring our fave appetizers. Mmmmm.

3) Our little family Christmas...We celebrated with 2 family services in the afternoon & 1 candlelight service on Christmas Eve. A really wonderful, worship-ful night- with our spirit figures providing the backdrop for the live retelling of the birth of Jesus. Gboo dressed as an angel and was almost angelic :). We (preacher & wifer) woke up BEFORE Greta on Christmas morning and had time to set up a skyping session with Granny & Gramps so they could see Gboo and Wessy open their Santa gifts. Fun stuff...not as good as having them here, but it does help I think. Greta really "got it" this year. She can tell you the Christmas story and enjoyed using our advent calendar to count down the days until Jesus' birth & she is no longer freaked out by Santa. This made things pretty fun & amazing this year with her observations.

4) Christmas at Grandpa's...first stop Christmas morning. We had a delicious brunch, an overly competitive game of word on the street (we are ALL competitive), and lots of lovely presents. A real treat.

5) Christmas at Grandma's...Christmas morning part deux, complete with good food & presents. We had a really lovely relaxing afternoon and the kiddos loaded up once again on goodies. It was hard to say if our kids or "Baby Boy Binnie" won the award for most goodies acquired. Our family's generosity is overwhelming.

We are now turning our attention to tidying up the house and passing on a few things we no longer need to make room for the new Christmas booty. It promises to be a relaxing week which will be a most welcome occurrence for us to close out 2010. This is a good thing, because look what all this excitement has done to the preacher:

We look forward to 2011 in hopes that it is a happy, healthy year for our family and yours. Pray for us as we near the anniversary of Greta's illness. We are hoping that our euphoria of ringing in her 4th year will overshadow our lingering feelings of sadness around the most difficult part of last year. We are already making plans on how to celebrate G's 4th year and how to mark & transform Jan 9th into a day when we can make some peace with last year's heartache (so far a trip to donate blood is on the docket...we're praying about other ways we might mark this day and do something good and meaningful). Love to you during these last (hopefully quiet) days of 2010. We'll try to compile a "best of" list before 2011 comes around!