This Great Work

Per our contract for living in China, our unmarried children get a free flight to come and visit us.  Chandler is the only one who qualifies for that, but for quite some time, getting a visa to visit wasn't even a possibility.  And when it did become a possibility, it was very expensive and required a 4 day stay in Washington DC or paying a whole lot of money for someone to go into the embassy to do that process for us.  It was not really in consideration.  But when Cache offered to do it for us while he was in DC for Thanksgiving, we decided to go to all of the effort to make it happen.  We decided to keep it a secret from the girls so it would be an amazing Christmas surprise. We did mostly well on the surprise.  Greta did hear me talking to Cache about the visa process one day back in November, but didn't think too much about it or ask further questions so we hoped that she hadn't really heard as I supposed.  I also had up the map of the Seattle air...

As most people's traditions are, many of our Christmas traditions are centered around food.  Christmas Eve and Christmas day are the two biggest.   For as long as Tom and I have been married, Christmas Eve food has been homemade Chinese food.  We all have our assignments and the entire day is spent prepping, chopping, mixing sauces, borrowing neighbor's cookware/oven to pull off our feast.  We invite several friends and family over and eat our hearts out.   It's a lovely tradition. However, (not sure why!) but the girls were not in the mood for Chinese food this Christmas Eve....  They wanted American food.  Hamburgers, French fries, fry sauce.  We have been working on this menu for a bit so we can share it with Chinese friends, and we have the fries down.  We have to special order the oil, and in our practice, I discovered that ground kosher salt is amazing on fries. But the hamburger is another story....  I have ground up my ...

Each year, we pick a Christmas theme plan activities, devotionals and present-opening requirements around that theme.  We quite like it.  It helps us stay focused on Jesus Christ for the whole month. Greta says it's her favorite thing about Christmas.  This year our theme was "Choose Christ".  I made these posters and hung them around the house.  They will stay up for the year reminding us of our theme. For our Christmas Kick Off activity in November, we flipped a coin to decide whether we were going out for dinner at McDonald's or KFC.  Once there, we used a random number generator to determine which item we were getting. We got KFC #9, which was a hamburger.  The girls were so upset that they didn't get to choose. (At that point they didn't know it was the Christmas Kick Off and just thought we were being unreasonable.)  Hamburgers in China are not recommended and from KFC, it was an especially terrible outcome. But that was the point. We l...

 We were really looking forward to our Christmas open house.  Our freezer was filling up.  Wedding cookies. Candied nuts.  Ginger snaps.  Mini butterhorn rolls.  Chocolate mint crinkle cookies.  Peanut butter kiss cookies (with M&M's).  Caramels. Chocolate bark.  I had made salsa and special ordered corn chips. I had ordered Jolly Time popcorn (Chinese popcorn pops very differently, not to our liking). I had ordered cute toothpicks for a veggie/cheese pick.  I had procured a Christmas table runner, cute serving platters and small paper plates that said "Merry Christmas".  I hoarded cranberries to make stove top potpourri to make our apartment smell like Christmas.  Many of these were smallish feats given baking and Christmas supplies here.  But as Christmas drew closer, lock downs were beginning to happen very near us.  The city started reporting 20-30 new cases a day which seemed to be alarming officials.  S...