We interrupt this series to bring you Joy to the World!

Last year Esther had a favorite Christmas carol, O Come, O Come Emmanuel.  (I'm not sure  if she "got" that it was about Jesus, however; she seemed to think we were signing about  a neighbor boy named Emmanuel.)  She wanted us to sing it every night during advent, and she would chime in with the "rejoice, rejoice" in the chorus, if she hadn't wandered off by the time we got that far into the song.

This year, Esther can actually sing Christmas carols!  Given how much unfamiliar vocabulary there is (e.g. "ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here"), she can chime in with surprisingly many words on five or six different carols.  And she will go around singing snatches of them to herself, occasionally with alterations ("Joy to the world, the Lord has made!").  Her favorite carol this year is definitely Joy to the World.  All the children were supposed to lead the adults in singing it at the end of their Christmas play, so I worked with Esther on learning the words, and she did a very good job.  Then every time without fail that we sang it as part of our advent family time, she had to stop after the first sentence and announce, "I sang this at Emma's church!"  (Emma is the first friend she made there, and it appears that the church is going to be "Emma's church" indefinitely.)  Hearing her singing carols, reciting our advent verses, and understanding and appreciating a good bit of the Christmas story, I realize how much she's changed in the past year.  I can't wait to see what the next year brings!

Anyway, here are some pictures of our Christmas season.

Esther was an angel in the Christmas play.  You wouldn't guess from this picture that she spent the time between getting dressed and heading into church by running through the Sunday school area and play-fighting with one of the Three Wise Men.  For some reason, she seems to think that ten- and eleven-year-old boys are her peers.

Esther's part in the play was (thankfully!) very small.  After the main angel announced Jesus' birth to the shepherds, Esther and a gaggle of other little angels walked down the aisle hand-in-hand, made a circle around the main angel, and walked clockwise while somebody sang a song.  Then the main angel led them to the manger, where they were followed by the shepherds, and they all remained contemplating the baby for the duration of another song.  Esther had wandered off and had to be forcibly retrieved by the main angel at this point during rehearsals, but did alright during the real thing.  One of the bigger kids said that she tried to take the baby out of the manger, but I didn't see anything, so it must have been discreet.  The picture above is of the angels and shepherds gathered around the manger.  The picture below is of all the kids singing Joy to the World.  I'm not sure what words Esther was singing for the 2nd and 3rd verses, which she doesn't know nearly as well as the 1st, but she was singing something with gusto.





Another fun Christmas activity was making gifts for Grandma and Grandpa.  I thought they came out really cute!  (Another gift isn't pictured because the recipient hasn't gotten it yet...we were late on getting things out this year.)






























And finally, there were presents for Esther herself.  For the past month, she has been asking for two things for Christmas: a belt, and lime juice.  (Sometimes I let her have a few drops of lime juice on her tongue when I'm cooking with it, and she has been wanting her own container so she can have as much as she wants.)  She found both items in her stocking, and she was thrilled.  (She is also now the only person I know who would follow up an Andes mint with a swig of lime juice.)  I hadn't thought about the fact that a belt, of course, requires pants, and that I had had a particular darling Christmas dress in mind for her to wear.  She consented to put the dress on for a photo shoot, but only after I promised that she could change back into pants and a belt as soon as the photos were done.  Then our camera had an unfortunate mishap.  I had balanced it on a rather shaky piece of small furniture so we could use the self-timer function and get a family portrait, and Esther, in rushing to look at the picture on the digital screen, accidentally bumped into the furniture, sending the camera onto the floor and jamming the smaller ring of the lens down into the larger one, from whence it could not be dislodged.  It remains to be seen whether repair is possible, but the remainder of our Christmas pictures were taken with our video camera's still function, and are somewhat dark and grainy.

We (or rather, Esther) opened gifts off and on throughout the day.  We also enjoyed playing in the snow, talking to family on the phone, watching a couple of Esther's new videos, and eating a feast (Tim's and my first time to cook a turkey ourselves; it turned out great!) by the light of all the candles on our advent wreath.  It was a lovely and memorable day.

I'll leave you with one last picture that was too cute to pass up.  This is how Esther felt about opening up a Dragon Tales video.

And now Christmas is over.  I miss our advent traditions, and I will miss our decorations when we put them up.  But I'm glad that Jesus doesn't really come just once a year, but that we can enjoy his presence with us all year long!