Merry Christmas 2016!

 

Hark, the herald angels sing: “Glory to the newborn King!”

 

Wishing you a very merry Christmas 2016!  May the Peace of Christ’s birth remain with you into the new year!  Let us welcome Him into our hearts and homes!  Thank you for being a reader.

 

May your hearts be merry and light!

 

Some real Army family talk:

 

This is our third Christmas together, and our second one where he has been gone in another state for the weeks (months) leading up to Christmas. We only get two weeks together and then he is back off to Fort Benning to continue his school. With it just being me and my 15 month old baby, I didn’t want to decorate, bake, and shop without him. So we condensed the entire Christmas experience into the two weeks he was home. It made for a lot of chaotic fun, but it’s also not the same as leisurely spending the weeks before Christmas building the holiday anticipation. If you’re doing it alone this year, I see you. I hope next year is more normal for us! I’d like to spend the whole Christmas season together, and not just two weeks. I hope that for you too.

 

I’m also genuinely curious, if you’ve been one of the Army families to only spend 2 weeks together, how do you celebrate the season best? I know a lot of people think it’s depressing to wait until holiday block leave to celebrate.  When I was a kid, and my dad wasn’t home for the holidays, we either waited to celebrate it with him, or celebrated it on a different day when he was actually home. It never depressed me, because I didn’t want to celebrate without him. And that’s how I feel now, about my husband. But if my daughter was older, I think I would need to make sure we did fun Christmas things, just the two of us, leading up to the holiday. Anyways, leave a comment below if you have a holiday season-without-husband type of system for your family.

 

And no matter what your Christmas is looking like this year, I hope it’s a very merry one!

 

PS: And here is an amazing Christmas desert to make on one of the next 12 days, because what is Christmas without a touch of Paris?

 

PPS: I apologize for not including a family pic like I did last year. With the crazy-Army-2-weeks-of-leave-and-that’s-it kind of holiday, we were too busy having fun to stop for a photo op! oops.

 

Merry Christmas 2016!