New Year's Eve

For New Year's Eve, we went over to Matt & Sarah's house (friends from our community group at church). Matt is in the military and was getting ready to be deployed overseas for the next four months.

A highlight of the party was constructing a gingerbread house with our friends: Sarah and Jen, along with our little friends: Cadence, Avery and Hailey.

After reconstructing the roof, which had a propensity of sliding off, the house was finished. Structural integrity can definitely be an issue for a gingerbread house!

Christmas Day!

Christmas morning started off with yummy pumpkin pancakes, coconut syrup and lattes. We then Skyped with Brent's family who were gathered together in New Jersey. Afterwards we read the Christmas story variations in each of the Gospels and in The Jesus Storybook Bible.

We took a walk around the camp, trudging through lots of Christmas snow. Then came back and prepared a scrumptious Christmas meal of chicken piccata, angel hair pasta, green bean casserole and sourdough bread.

Then we opened presents together and enjoyed looking at the warm glowing lights of our Christmas tree.

We wrapped up the night by watching Christmas Spectacular (a Radio City Music Hall production that we have seen in NYC) http://www.radiocitychristmas.com/newyork/ and enjoying a special homemade dessert - pumpkin bundt cake with maple frosting and walnuts, yummy!

Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve we went to the "Imagine Christmas" service at our church. Though we missed being with our biological families, we enjoyed being with our church family and friends. Our church embraces creativity and always finds ways to do things "outside the box." We really enjoyed the following clip that was shown, "The Digital Story Of The Nativity": http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=GkHNNPM7pJA

Contemporary songs were interspersed with a creative drama showing the Son of God going to earth from the angels' perspective.

Because we were so dressed up (by Alaska's standards) we wanted to get a picture. The beautiful red tie that Brent is wearing was a thoughtful gift from Aunt Eleanor.

Afterwards we went to Devin and Sarah's house and hung out with friends from our community group. We tackled a 750 piece puzzle of Times Square giving us our "Christmas in NYC" fix.

Jen and her daughter, Hailey, thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

Here's the finished puzzle. We are blessed to have a great church and new friends in this area.