Christmas Traditions

Merry Christmas, all! We hope you are having a great holiday! Ours has been very relaxing and a lot of fun--the best kind of holiday, in my opinion.

Recently, a friend asked us about our Christmas traditions, and I couldn't really think of anything unique that we do for the holiday. Well, even if they're not that unique, there are a few things that are traditional for us (or becoming so):

• Reading the Christmas story together, sometimes with the help of Joseph Brickey's When Jesus Was Born in Bethlehem (which has beautiful paintings and which uses the text from Matthew and Luke to tell the story chronologically)
• Eating treat cereal on Christmas morning (breaking from the norm of oatmeal, bran flakes, Cheerios, etc. The family favorites are Lucky Charms and Count Chocula. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find Count Chocula these days???)
• Treasure hunting for presents. For L, I write cryptic riddles. ("I have four legs and one leaf but no branches") and hide the clues around the house. For the younger kids, I take pictures with the digital camera to use for clues.
• Watching It's a Wonderful Life.
  
• Watching A Christmas Carol (Mickey's Christmas Carol, A Muppet Christmas Carol, and the Patrick Stewart A Christmas Carol--but not all on the same day!)
• Listening to our favorite Christmas music: Josh Groban's Noel, Julie Andrews' Greatest Christmas Songs, and Amy Grant's Home for Christmas. (I miss John Denver's Rocky Mountain Christmas from my growing-up years. It was my mom's then-favorite.)
• Sledding down the hill at Grammy Grace's house (a tradition introduced by C's dad. Just take care not to careen into the fence or the hedge--ouch!)
• Coming home from sledding and thawing out with a steaming mug of cocoa (with the little freeze-dried marshmallows that are just like the Count Chocula marshmallows from when I was a kid. Did I mention that I love Count Chocula yet?)

Not unique, perhaps, but I can't imagine Christmas without any of it!

Happy holidays to everyone! I hope your day has been as wonderful as ours!

MOJ

See, Daddy! Santa IS Real!

I have a confession to make: I'm not a Santa Claus enthusiast.

I know it's shocking, and everything, but there you go.

Now, it's not that I have anything against Saint Nicholas of Myra--I love the stories about him. I just want my children to know that presents show up under the Christmas tree because THEIR PARENTS love them, and we budget and scrimp and save and sacrifice to make Christmas fun for them.

L, S, and R all know this, of course; they've known it for years. But J is only three, so he doesn't remember the holidays from last year. It's all new to him: the lights, the tree, the stockings...

...and Santa.

Now, I've tried to explain. I've told him how I'M Santa Claus, and I'M the one who wraps the presents and who eats the cookies that we leave out.

And just about the time I thought I had convinced him, we had the annual Christmas Party at church and (I should have known this was coming) in walked Santa Claus, jingling bells, laughing merrily, and handing out candy canes.

And while all of the children were happy to see him, there was one little boy who was beside himself with delight. His voice rang out, over the excited chatter of the other kids: "See, Daddy!!! Santa IS real!!!"

I couldn't bear to shatter the dream. He was so excited. His eyes lit up and he was grinning from ear to ear. He was nearly dancing with anticipation as he stood in line, waiting for his turn to sit on Santa's lap and chat with him. He couldn't stop asking me when his turn would come and kept telling me that Santa was real. Santa was real!

I was very well behaved. I refrained from yanking the beard off the imposter and exposing the conspiracy.

That's probably good, I suppose. Think what might have happened had I not kept my peace. Families may have been torn apart as children found out their parents have been lying to them for years. Hurt feelings. Tears.

Who needs that on their conscience?

MOJ

p.s. We're still working on the "I'm Santa Claus" thing. But ever since that party, it's been an uphill battle.

Final Relief

I'm DONE!!!! My last final exam was yesterday--two questions, nine hours, suffering beyond imagination. I hope I did okay; I won't find out until mid-January.

Either way, I feel like I learned a lot this term, and it was fun (in a sick sort of way) to go through the final exams, because it brought back all of the topics we've studied and made me appreciate how much we've learned.

For now, I'm just enjoying being done. Vacation -- now there's a good idea!

MOJ

Final Terror

Okay, so I'm forehead-deep in finals--just one exam left (on Friday), and I just finished my (possibly) most terrifying exam: Civil Procedure. Even though I've enjoyed the course and was really thankful to have had an engaging professor (as the topic could be horribly dry in the wrong hands), I have been scared to death about the exam, based largely on the deplorable grade I got on the midterm two months ago. (And, no, it wasn't one of those, "Boo hoo, I only got an A-" exams. It was more along the lines of "WHAT? Is that my PERCENTAGE? Do they GO that low?") Apparently, missing the issues, failing to manage time during the test itself, and thinking-you're-prepared-when-you're-really-not is not a winning combination.

So I've been scrambling to get a handle on things so that doesn't happen to me again. With the exam scheduled for early this morning (Monday), I've been spending some LONG days studying (which also means I've been spending days abandoning my wife in almost every one of her parenting hours of need).

Then, late Saturday night, as I was trying to cram in the last of my preparation before the Sabbath, my computer cord decided that, rather than work SOMEtimes and not others, it would like to at least be consistent, and it chose not to work AT ALL. Yes, that would be the computer that I would be using on the 4-hour exam. Yes, it's the one with the 45-minute battery life. Well, I wasn't happy about its decision, but despite a fair amount of friendly coaxing and an extreme amount of not-so-friendly threatening, I could not breathe any life into it.

So what was, up to that point, trepidation for the looming exam now became sheer terror. What would happen if I couldn't get it to work? What if I could get it to work, but then it died in the middle of the exam? Yes, they provide blue books, but I can't imagine doing the exam on paper. It takes so much longer to write things out by hand (and the teacher told us that we WOULD be pressed for time on the exam--guaranteed); plus, the computer allows you to change/edit things on the fly, which is critical if you miss something major and need to go back and put it in during the exam. Terror, I tell you. Abject horror.

Can you pray for computer cords? I hope so, because I did.

A lot.

Still, I couldn't get anything more than a flicker of life, and it would die (a) if the cord was budged at all, (b) if I blinked, or (c) for no reason whatsoever. All Sunday, whenever I thought about it, I prayed that it would go back to it's almost-always-functioning self (or even its sometimes-functioning-self). This morning--same thing. When I actually went in to take the exam, I plugged the cord in and...

...it didn't work.

Aaaaaaaaaaaargh! ("Do you hear that Fezzik? That is the sound of ultimate suffering. My heart made that sound when the six-fingered man killed my father. A desperate law student makes it now.")

In desperation, I wrenched the cord around--which I had tried, without success, for quite some time Saturday night--and suddenly, it came to life! I was intensely-but-cautiously happy and was careful not to touch it at all (or to let the planets align in the wrong way or to let the blood flow through my veins/arteries too loudly), and my power cord survived through my entire exam! No trouble whatsoever--no sign of its determination to slowly sap me of the last of my vitality.

It was such a relief.

Simple mercies--nothing earth-shaking in even the grand scheme of things, but a blessing nonetheless.

I'm grateful for that.

MOJ

Update (12/16--got a new power cord now. Phew! No more taking chances!)

Final Exams

Final exams are upon me at the law school. I've taken one already--did okay, I think--but the three scariest ones are thundering toward me in the next few days/weeks. I've got one on Wednesday (the day after my birthday--come ON!), then one on the 15th and my final Final on the 19th. In two of my classes, the final exam grade is the ONLY grade in the class--there have been no assignments, projects, etc. Just ONE shot to sink or swim! Only 12 more days, and then FREEDOM!

I can't WAIT to be done! I can't wait for a break. I've learned more about "six days shalt thou labor" this semester than I've EVER experienced before.

That said, I've enjoyed it, too. I feel like I've learned a TON. I've learned what to expect and I've got a better strategy for doing well next term. And I've learned a critical thing about myself, something that I never, ever would have discovered in any other setting: I have extremely loud shoelaces. (Amazing how the silence of a law library opens up these new vistas, isn't it?)

MOJ

p.s. Okay, so there's no telling whether I'll be able to post again until Finals are done. I don't seem to have much spare time these days. And the little time I do have is mostly filled with fearful sobbing.



Just kidding, Mom. I know how you worry.



Just kidding, Everyone Else. I know Mom hasn't read this.