Christmas pictures

Sorry there are a zillion pics.

Nathaniel at Pennsylvania Christmas:




California Christmas:











Maryland Christmas:

Christmas Eve

We're leaving for Maryland in the morning, but right now we're enjoying Christmas Eve. Carl's family has bunches of Christmas Eve traditions: for one thing, they always have chili on Christmas Eve. I think it was Carl's great (or great-great?) grandfather who worked on a railroad, and Christmas Eve was the day he had to spend with family. So all the kids would come and visit him all day and they would just have a giant pot of chili on the stove people could eat whenever.

They also open all the presents on Christmas Eve. (Christmas morning is just for Santa.)

They also have a big family talent show. This year I was going to do something with Gary Hoey's rendition of Twas the Night Before Christmas, but Carl said that would be "too embarrassing." (Gary Hoey raps the poem and apparently I am too white to rap.) So instead I will be doing Down in Yon Forrest again, with Carl's sister's guitar.

In my family... let's see. On my mom's side, there's the tradition of opening one present on Christmas Eve, as like a preview for Christmas morning. We usually read the Christmas story.

Carl and I haven't yet figured out which traditions we'll keep. I think until we had Nathaniel we were both pretty chill about everything--too chill for traditions. But now that we have him, we'll probably have to figure out what kinds of things we want to make staples of his childhood.

I really like this one thing I found on Pinterest, a strategy for gift-giving. For birthdays and Christmas, kids get:

1 thing of want
1 thing of need
1 thing to wear
1 thing to read

I like that.

Anyway. We're also talking to Carl's brother Sam tonight. This is exciting because he's still on his mission in El Salvador and I think he gets to Skype (yay!). Nathaniel will be a full year old before Carl's brother gets home, but maybe Sam can see Nathaniel tonight.

Happy Christmas Eve! Do any of you have any good Christmas Eve traditions?

cutest picture from last photoshoot

Our awesome friend Heather took pictures of Nathaniel on Sunday. Here is one of my favorites:



I guess the ornament must have tasted good because he kept on trying to eat it. Silly baby!

Christmas programs!

Things are just getting crazy in time for the ward Christmas events! I'm the director of our ward choir, and also I am a decent pianist, so that means that I am accompanying about half of all performances this Saturday night for the ward Christmas party, and then I am directing and/or accompanying all the music on Sunday's Christmas program. Then in the evening of Sunday I'll be accompanying a community caroling event in Urbana.

I just decided that for the ward Christmas party, I'll be playing and singing Down in Yon Forest, a cool hymn I just discovered like two days ago. I arranged myself a version of it an hour ago and I'll teach the ward to sing the chorus parts (the 2nd and 4th line of every verse are the same each time). Here's a choir singing it:



So pretty.

Also for the party, I wrote an arrangement of Silent Night and It Came Upon The Midnight Clear as a medley for piano and violin (surprise! I'm on the piano).

For Sunday's program, we'll be singing Lo How A Rose and Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day.

If our choir were an audition-only British boys choir, and they sang a way cooler and more difficult arrangement than we are, this is how they would sound:



I have SUCH A CRUSH ON THAT SONG. I wish we could pull off this... or well, anything by John Gardner.

We are doing an easy rendition I got for FREE (yay free, esp. when you have no budget for your choir), based on this melody featured in Rutter's arrangement:



I also love Rutter. Ah. Love him so much. Wish we could pull off a Rutter, too. Oh well.

I also wrote an arrangement of the Huron Carol for performance in sacrament meeting. It sounds only vaguely like this (in that it has the same words! yay):



And in final news, I decided that next year FOR SURE I want to perform Rejoice Greatly, O Daughter of Zion by Handel at some venue.

The end.

decorating the tree!

Today, my mother, Nana, Grampy, Jacque, Elli, Nathaniel and I all went down to the temple to decorate the Christmas tree for Seneca Stake. We have been excited about it for weeks.

Nathaniel enjoyed sitting with Grampy:



And the rest of us decorated. The tree was clearly tall:



We started at the top of the tree and worked our way down. The top of the tree represents Heaven and it's all glitzy and covered in stars and balls and angels and ribbon. The ribbons represent how we are all tied together as children of God, and how we are all tied to Heaven. The balls represent the planets, that God created along with the stars. Down at the bottom of the tree, the poinsettas are symbolic of the Christ and the fruit boughs are symbolic of the fruits of the Spirit.



Baby fell asleep in the sling:



We had the tree closest to the Christus--prime real estate for the awesomest tree in the Visitor's Center. This is Nana and me, putting lights up around the creche in the center of the tree:



Babies slept. People decorated. Ladders were everywhere.



In the end, the tree looked pretty good (if I do say so myself).



Our tree's ornaments are ones we made ourselves, from creches bought in the Czech Republic. The creche pieces are very small, but we blew the images up and then added beads and sequins. The creche we used is of all the native Czechs bringing presents to the baby Jesus. Here are some of my favorites. Below you can see the artist's self-portrait (he's the one with the art, duh. we actually had to Photoshop the pipe he was smoking out of the picture), a tailor bringing a jacket, a shepherd bringing a lamb, and a musician playing his horn:



Here is the creche, the wise men, some animals and children coming to view the baby:



A band of musicians (I love the cellist) and a baker bringing a birthday cake:




The city of Bethlehem:



The geniuses behind it all:




The tree took 30 manhours to decorate, not counting the many many hours spent hand-creating each individual ornament.

This time, for the first time, decorating the tree was very spiritual for me. I kept looking at the pictures of the people taking things to Christ: the birthday cake, the jacket, music, bread, horses, chickens, piglets, toys. What could I bring Him?

All He asks is a broken heart and a contrite spirit. That's the best gift anyone can bring to Jesus Christ.

But in the meantime, the gifts portrayed on our tree are pretty cool.