Oh the craziness...

...of the season. It's beginning. I really shouldn't be taking the time to sit and blog, but I find the process to be therapeutic. I checked and Pandora has a folk Christmas music channel. Repeatedly hearing "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" is also therapeutic.

Today we began our St. Nick's celebration. My intentions were to make snow dough and have that for the girls to play with while I read them stories of the life of St. Nick. But the snow dough didn't work out. It never formed a ball, and was super sticky, no matter how much flour I added. So I chucked the snow dough and pulled out the modeling beeswax. Fidget made an angel and Bookie made a candle while I read some stories I found at this site. Both were added to our tree as decoration.

The most therapeutic moment of the evening came during the lighting of our Advent spiral. We cut the lights off, lit the candle and the Christmas tree. Bookie chose the booklet of the day from the Advent calendar my mom gave us and read to us. Fidget moved Mary and Joseph forward. On the radio played "O Come, O Come Emmanuel". And for a moment I found peace. Deep peace. Powerful peace. It washed over me, and then it passed.

I am thankful for moments like that.

Today I leave you with our Advent prayer. We sing this every day after we light our spiral, and we sing it every week with our church family.

Oh, hear us, we pray, God, for dark is the night.
And still we are waiting in hope for the light.
Oh, teach us to trust you, preparing the way,
Until with rejoicing we enter the day.