How I Spent my Christmas Day

Merry (late!) Christmas! I hope you all had wonderful days with your family, and that even if the holiday was difficult for you, you still found something in it that brought you joy and peace.

Our Christmas this year was a lot of fun. We don’t have a lot of Christmas traditions that we keep every single year, but there are some we usually stick to. Here’s a little bit of how the day went.

-My family is from Mexico, so of course, we eat tamales on Christmas Eve. My grandma usually makes pork and sweet tamales (which have raisins and coconut and are basically the best dessert ever). There are usually so many leftovers that we end up eating them until New Year’s.

-Our tree this year was white, and I loved it, especially because we ended up getting it super last minute! Word to the wise: don’t procrastinate on buying your Christmas tree. You won’t really save that much, but you will have to drive all around the city looking for one!

-We started our Christmas morning by going to church for the Christmas service. It was a lovely service, and I’m glad Christmas fell on Sunday this year so we got the chance to spend some of it there.

-One of my favorite parts of Christmas is filling the stockings. One year, when let’s just say my budget was a bit smaller in college, I assigned myself as the official family stocking filler, and I think I did a pretty awesome job. I get other gifts now too, but I always love thinking about what to put in people’s stockings (especially because it's an excuse to buy lots of chocolate!). I also love how cute and different our stockings are:

-After all the present opening, we played a game of Monopoly since we found our old Peanuts version of the game earlier this month. It lasted a good five hours, and I won! I was pretty excited about it because I almost never win board games…

-Another thing we traditionally do on Christmas is drive around at night to see the light displays in some parts of our city. However, we were all really tired last night, so we decided to push it till today. Even though it’s no longer Christmas, I feel like the week leading up till New Year’s still kind of counts.

Anyway, I hope you also had a lovely Christmas. I’ll leave you with this quote form Max Lucado, which I think speaks to the true meaning of Christmas:

"He came, not as a flash of light or as an unapproachable conqueror, but as one whose first cries were heard by a peasant girl and a sleepy carpenter. Eternity interrupted time, divinity interrupted carnality, and heaven interrupted the earth in the form of a baby.”

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