Christmas 2008

And His name shall be 
the hope of all the world. 
~ Matthew 12:21 (The Living Bible)

Our Christmas Festivities started off with sending the oldest off to celebrate with her group of friends.  They had a wonderful time and met at PF Chang's for a reportedly scrumptious dinner!

Then... came the yearly sleep-over at Nana and Papaw's with ALL the grandkids!  They must have had a great time, 'cause I had to call and tell them to "Please" come on home!  Santa comes to our house on the morning of Christmas Eve and did he ever (courtesy of big sister) leave "the perfect" life-size gift for lil' sis!

Santa brought some real cool night vision goggles, too!

Somebody was  pretty proud of his Civil War documentaries and Godfather DVD collections, might I add....

....and tickled with his license tag frame, too!

But I do believe the hit of the party was "Rock Band..."

Notice who immediately set it up and started playing with it!

The silly one in the bunch had a list for Santa a mile long.... most of which were redecorating supplies for her room for college, soooooo no interesting pics for her!

We shared our evening with the whole fam..."over the river and through the woods, to Grandma's house- we went!"

It looked like text messages were flying in and out of there as fast as they could hit send!

Until the practice.... the grandkids sang together at a precious Christmas Eve program we had at church.  It was a great time for our family to get together and focus on what Christmas is all about.  There's no better place to be on Christmas Eve than together worshipping God's Son....

There was plenty of time for gift-giving, horsing around, and of course, eating, when we made it back to Nana and Papaw's...  We were extremely blessed to have the oldest nephew home this year, as many other military families were not able to be with their loved ones.  Our meal was graced by this special young man (my nephew) with a tearful prayer asking grace for our meal and peace for his fellow service men that were not able to be home this holiday season.

!

Guess who got the biggest toy?  He could hardly wait to get it out of the box!  Men and their toys... they never change, do they?

For He himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in His flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in Himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which He put to death their hostility.  He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near.  (Ephesians 2:14-17)