This year, our Christmas wasn’t so hot.  If you’ve been poking around these bloggy parts for long, you well know that the whole house thing pretty much has a big, fat dark cloud permanently over my head.  Christmas just kind of intensified that.  No tree of our own.  Our ornaments in storage.  Having spent a good part of the year prepping my mother-in-law for us leaving her house on Christmas Eve to wake up in our own home Christmas morning just to have HH call her two days before to tell her that we would, indeed, be staying through Christmas morning.  It all made me feel pretty yucky.  My goal, though, was not to complain.  It was not lost on me that all of this house stuff was put on us at a time when I was to dwell on Mary and her plight to give birth.  She rode one hundred miles to Bethlehem.  On a donkey. She ended up giving birth, with no epidural, in a barn (or cave, if you will). A stable full of cow poop, no doubt. 

Celebrating the anniversary of that birth from the second floor of my parents’ home, filled to the brim with chocolate-covered everything– in comparison, not so bad.

Then, it seemed in an ironic twist that the Advent theme for our worship service was HOME.  The word found me most Sunday mornings flip flopping between tears of thankfulness and weariness.  “Jesus is your home”, Bro. Don said more than once… words I mumbled to myself each time I would start to feel overwhelmed by the house situation.

I made peace with the holiday.  Kind of.  It’s more like I called a truce.  The ups and downs were getting to me, so in the spirit of  “it can’t get any worse”, I decided to just get over myself, count my many blessings, and get on with it.

Then, I saw this year’s Santa picture:

Yeah, it’s really blurry.  Yeah, I’ve already “Picnik”ed the heck out of it.

Then, my prone-to-febrile-seizures- little boy awoke at 2:00 A.M., Christmas Eve morning burning up with fever.  A fever that didn’t break for over 48 hours.

This short-lived smile was courtesy of the Batcave.  The blurry photo, courtesy of my phone, which, surprisingly takes better pictures than our real camera.

So, yeah, it did get worse.  I think it’s safe to say that our Christmas was kind of stinky.  Maybe one day we’ll laugh about it.  (Personally, though, I think that day is WAY. FAR. OFF.)  We have been blessed in that our problems, though monsterous and all-encompassing to us now, are temporary.  Tomorrow is a brand new day.  A brand new year.   A brand new decade. Good things will happen in 2010.  We will become homeowners.  Sure, maybe it won’t be the house we’ve prayed for and over for the past four months, but we will buy a home this year. 

Of course, we do still have to issue before us of the blurry pictures and not appropriately capturing the memories of 2010 for all of posterity.  That’s why I hope 2010 will bring this:

It’s already in my Amazon shopping cart, by the way.

Yeah, 2010 will be better.