Happy Friday!! The weekend is hours away in my timezone. It’s chilly too in my neck of the woods, so I’m pretty excited to spend a couple days snuggled up around a fire.
Today’s Meet N Greet question…
What’s your own little family tradition you have or grew up with at Christmastime?
Love these Meet N Greets! Feel free to chat around and meet one another. I love having a space for us, children of God, to fellowship in this blogging space.
A couple things from my side:
- I have a new post up called Stop Me Please! Which is about a crazy past week that I had and how God loves us way too much to let us stay in the depths.
- Prayers please for the church. I have several people in my circles who are struggling with or have family struggling with physical diseases. Prayers for hearts to be restored in Jesus’ blood and water of the Spirit and for healed bodies, and for our God to consume us, as the consuming fire that he is.
- I’m probably going to write a new book, breaking ground in January. Exciting! Sorry if I’ve mentioned this before lol.
Hope you have a beautiful Friday and weekend!
Your brother,
Joel
inthedesertwithjesus 
Hi Joel, that’s an exciting way to start the new year; I wish you all the best on your book. As for your question, coming from a broken family, nothing about Christmas has been especially traditional. But I have always been in choirs, even directing one for a few years, so the singing of beautiful music celebrating the birth of our savior and the faith of the holy family is my favorite thing about Christmas time. I hope to carry forth this tradition into my own family. Looking forward to next weekend when we hold our concert. When the girls are older perhaps they’ll want to visit hospitals and group homes with me and join in the singing. Thanks for your question, but you didn’t answer it yourself!
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Hey! Thank you for the support 🙂 love that, singing. I used to go to a really old methodist church, in a Gothic style cathedral like building and the Christmas eve service started at 11pm, it was candlelight, there were lovely hymns sung by the choir and we did communion. It was just lovelt. That’s a good tradition you hope to carry forward. And Understood about coming from a broken family and traditions.
Hope you a beautiful weekend in the Rockies! 🙂
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Our family tradition is that a sheep/goat and in some cases chicken must die, and after Church we have a feast. In fact two sheep are going down tomorrow though it’s not Christmas and I’ll be missing out. The land of meat, milk, and honey.
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That’s interesting Sarah! I haven’t heard that one before. Haven’t had sheep or goat for Christmas dinner. Chicken, yes. Thanks for sharing!!
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Welcome to Africa, a goat has to go down.
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Joel, met you through Shattered in Him. A blessed week-end and new Lord’s Day. ~ Fran
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Hi Fran! It was nice to meet you on there. She runs a great blog too! Hope you have blessed weekend and sabbath! -Joel
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A Christmas tradition I grew up with was… well, after moving abroad I have learned a great deal about Christmas in other countries and in Denmark, we celebrate Christmas eve. I have learned many are surprised to hear that.
During the morning of 24th my dad would bring home the tree and settle it. Then lunch and a walk in the forest. Then I’d be decorating the tree and putting on the candles (real candles, no electric stuff), while the smell of duck spread in the entire house. Christmas dinner was always duck with caramelized potatoes, potatoes and gravy and warm marinated red cabbage. For dessert we had rice porridge with a big whole almond in it – the one who got the almond, got the “almond present”. Always exciting! Then we cleared the table, poured candy and chocolates into bowls and brewed the coffee. Then we walked around the Christmas tree singing hymns… and then: Time to open up the presents! One by one, person by person, so everyone saw what anyone got. We were only 4 or 6 people for Christmas eve so opening presents in one go would take about 10 min… so we stretched the time. After that, more coffee, wine and candy until everyone was just ready for bedtime. I have such fond memories.
Here in Japan, my family still celebrates it similarly, but no singing around the tree (language and space doesn’t allow). Japanese are widely Buddhists so Christmas to them means: KFC, strawberry & whip cream cake, “valentines day-dates” etc. It’s all commercial of course, but the atmosphere is still nice.
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That sounds fun Lene! So your dad would cut the tree on Christmas eve and you all would decorate it then? Our family tradition is to get it the day or weekend after thanksgiving. Candles on the tree is doing it the right way!! That sounds beautiful! The food sounds fantastic. We do presents Christmas morning. It’s a fun way to wake up!
America is really commercialized too…it’s all about Santa and presents. It’s sad in a lot if ways. The atmosphere and store decor is fun though too. Plus here a lot of pretty liberal thinking has forced this “inclusive” culture of taking out Christmas and replacing it with “Holidays,” so as in theory to include other religions. The irony is most American celebrate Christmas, but call it the holidays. It’s weird, it’s spiritual warfare.
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Every year we took a picture of ourselves by the tree on Christmas Eve, just before leaving for church. While the girls are grown and that has stopped, we have an album of our family that includes every Christmas Eve.
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That sounds really neat Jeff!! Sometimes I wish we had done something like that.
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Our Christmas tradition is that all the men in the house prepare a brunch. It’s fun to see them all hard at work in the kitchen. 🙂 Afterward the girls clean up. We do a Christmas craft for all of the kids and take a picture of them to be remembered. My husband prepares something each year for the whole family. Sometimes it’s a reading, sometimes music or a Youtube the kids love. The Christmas story is told to the little ones each year using the nativity pieces. Hey, Joel, I love this idea of a meet and greet day. So cool! Fun to read how other’s celebrate Christmas.
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I love that Susan! That’s really unique and sounds like a lot of fun!! And thank you so much! We do a brunch too on Christmas Day at our grandma’s and it’s fun. Merry Christmas to you and your family!!
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