Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas. I am going to be a Christmas card slacker this year. Every year Jess would make sure we had a really cool family picture-- pick out a great layout and mail out Christmas cards. The best things about Jess are definitely the most painful right now and I treasure the memory of her doing our cards. Therefore this year I am going to wish everyone a Merry Christmas without sending out cards.

There our a couple of other things I have been thinking about for Christmas-- one of them was taking a family vacation someplace fun. We may do that some year and I think it would be a blast, but this year we are going to stay home and keep it simple. It took Jess and I a long time to come up with our version of how Christmas would be done. We had to find the answers to: What does Santa bring? How many presents should each kid get? How many presents do you get to open on Christmas Eve? I have decided that those answers will stay the same this year, but I also would like to do something in remembrance of Jess. I am thinking of each us lighting a candle for her on Christmas.

In high school I had a friend named Mark that would pray over his lunch before he ate it. He even prayed over snacks-- it was the weirdest thing seeing him pray over a pretzel. Back then, I could see why people would pray at dinner with their families, but I couldn't understand why Mark would want to do it by himself. Just as puzzling as Mark, that summer I found out that the other counselors would say and do things to me that made no sense at all. One week I was paired up with a girl named Kerry. When I asked Kerry what she thought of some simple changes to a bible verse to make it better, she flipped out and said I couldn't do that. Despite their weirdness though, I couldn't help making friends with everyone there. Probably my best friend there was a girl counselor named Jenny who I got along great with until one week. You'll hear that story tomorrow.