If you’re tired of that little mouse staring at you every time you check my site to see if I’ve updated, today is your lucky day. It is the busy season, (though what part of the year isn’t?) and blogging has slipped my mind. But the baby is napping after a long day of travel, and I’m ready to process the season.

We had a beautiful start to the Christmas season being with my family to celebrate Scott’s engagement. To see the joy and excitement in Scott’s and Anna’s faces the whole weekend was just awesome. It reminded me that anticipation is an emotion and a state to be relished especially at Christmas. Advent is about looking forward, and as Christians, our whole lives are to be lived out of the hope that Jesus is coming.

I’ve recently discovered that I love traditions. The momentous traditions like holiday celebrations are wonderful, but I have always admired people who made much of everyday rituals of celebrations. As we were mourning the death of our friend Sunday who passed away a few months ago, really special stories about his life surfaced. One of those stories was of him and a friend eating Easter dinner at a restaurant when out of the blue, Sunday asked the waiter for 2 glasses and a bottle of champagne. The friend asked why all of the sudden they were now going to have a glass of bubbly at lunchtime, and Sunday said, “Jesus is alive! I just feel the need to toast the resurrection and celebrate.” I just love that, everything about it. We should be people of celebration because Jesus is alive.

We have some friends in Oklahoma who went through a time of penny-pinching due to their recent move, needing to furnish a house, and a longer-than-expected job search for her. So one week, she made a huge pot of chili, and they ate it for something like 9 days! God’s provision for them in recent years has allowed a new meal most nights, but every year around that time, they eat chili for 9 days in a row as a remembrance and a reminder of God’s goodness to them.

So I’ve dipped my toe into the realm of personal traditions, and it’s been so fun and eye-opening. I’m sure all my readers are aware of our love for our local bakery, Two Little Red Hens. It’s been a weekend tradition for us for years, though we didn’t call it that. It’s amazing how such a little thing can go so deep into our hearts, but it’s real. Here’s what 2LRH does for us: solidifies or rekindles our love for New York depending on the atmosphere of our week, gives us time to sit across from a table and have a conversation or just marvel at the little girl sitting beside us kicking her feet waiting for another bite of scone, provides a place for us to bring people and have them love it too and therefore bond with us over it, and reminds us that God has made a place for us and built up a community around us. For me, that’s worth celebrating.

Addie’s weekend naptimes are a pivotal part of a good marriage. :-) We have her skip her morning nap on Saturdays so we can run errands and be outside and on Sundays so we can be at church, so those afternoon naps are extensive — something like 3.5 hours sometimes! One particularly exhausting week brought us to Saturday afternoon naptime, and we ordered a pizza and cokes delivered to us and had a feast in bed watching a movie. It was so fun, I can’t even tell you! And we have done it almost every weekend since as a way to celebrate a little time by ourselves. And when it’s over, we can hardly wait to wake Addie up!

I can’t wait for the big traditions of Christmas, but to mitigate the inevitable craziness and stress of the weeks before, I’m instituting everyday tradition-observing to maximize the healthy and holy anticipatory point of the whole thing: Jesus came!