Christmas eve...

Our neighborhood has a tradition of lining the streets with luminaries on Christmas eve. There are a few houses that choose not to participate, but 95% of the homes do and it is beautiful. It's a seemingly simple task and it has a huge impact. Thanks to whoever started this 27 years ago.

Steve enlisted Hallie and Hunter to help him with the paper bags. We debated what we wanted our Christmas eve to entail. We have family close and they were having dinner and a program. And as wonderful as it always is, we wanted something a little different. We wanted our family traditions. The traditions we started as a small family living too far from family on Christmas years ago. But we have family and it seemed silly not to join them. So we compromised. Dinner with family, program on our own and it was just what we were looking for. Our kids are still young so some of my grand ideas still haven't come to fruition, but we're working on them! We had some friends that recently moved to the area and didn't have any family so we invited them to join our small program. We started with the nativity. We all participated and dressed the part (thanks to my mom for our killer nativity costumes!). We read the nativity and sang songs. We got the kids in the car and drove the neighborhood to see the lumanaries and lights - of course stopping to see "that" house as I mentioned here. When we got back to the house, we participated in Peruvian traditions as we do each year. Panettone bread and hot cocoa, followed by fireworks/sparklers outside. Steve loves to reminisce his mission days and loves that he gets to share this tradition with his children. I'm just glad we stop at that and not continue with their tradition of staying up until midnight and opening all of their gifts. Can you imagine the cranky children we'd have??