It's Christmas time!

Things have been looking very festive around our house over the past few weeks!  We got our tree up the day after Thanksgiving and have been enjoying it ever since!  This Christmas season has seemed a little more special than normal and I've had a hard time putting my finger on it.  Sure, we've done all our traditional Christmas festivities, in fact, tonight making fudge and watching Rudolph are on the agenda :)  we had a small group Christmas party at our house Wednesday night that was a lot of fun, we've been reading our Story a Day til' Christmas (love this tradition!), there's even an extra stocking hung this year for our precious little one (thanks Lauren!) and Christmas music constantly playing. The kids at the preschool are in full Christmas mode and we're having our party Tuesday morning on our last day, these are just a few examples of the festivities we've been partaking in.  But this year, Christmas is a little more sentimental for me.  I've posted before that over the past year since we've started this adoption process, the Gospel has become so much more real.  So it makes sense that the Christmas story would mean that much more this year.  We watched a movie of the First Noel with the kids at preschool yesterday, and I literally got all teary eyed watching it.  Not only is it such a beautiful story of love, but sitting there, watching it with so many little ones, some of who were probably hearing it for the first time, I just got overwhelmed.  It's such a simple story, the birth of a baby, doesn't seem like anything special.  But that story is the epitome of love, and that baby is the King of Kings, our Savior!! That baby grew into the man who is weaving our story with another little baby on the other side of the world, and that gets me teary (ask my hubby, that's not hard to do these days!).  So while I can't wait to experience Christmas with a little one, and my heart aches for a baby that we've never met, this Christmas, I'm rejoicing in another birth, the birth of our Lord!  I'm rejoicing in a redeemer and a Father who cares enough to send a total stranger that I've never met before(and they didn't even know about the fundraiser, they were there for the band), along with her precious Ethiopian princess, to our Chick-Fil-A fundraiser last night who had just the right words of encouragement that we needed to keep going when this road looks never-ending.  Thank you Father for these precious gifts!