We had many to choose from, but the official 2007 Christmas Carol gift to Mommy is “Away in a Manger,” as chosen by the girls themselves. For the traditional ornament, Jocelyn made the Baby Jesus in swaddling clothes herself!

We had many options available to us, especially with Felicia’s recent obsession with “Up on the Housetop/Rooftop” and other well-known classics. In a nod to GrandPapa’s influence on my childhood musical tastes, the Royal Guardsmen made a last-minute bid with their “Snoopy’s Christmas,” but we ultimately decided for something a little more carol-ish.

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

This picture is also available on Flickr.

It’s exciting for two reasons … this is Jocelyn’s first all-cursive formal letter … and she’s written it to Santa!

A few days ago, we discovered the NORAD Santa Tracking website, which has provided lots of excitement — not to mention independent verification — about the science of Santa. Jocelyn has enjoyed following the Google-powered SantaCams and their video of Santa’s annual journey.

She has even been moved to pen this letter, which she wrote at 9:22 PM, PST, on December 24. It will be interesting to see how well Mr. Claus anticipated her and her sister’s desires.

This picture is also available on Flickr.

Stories from the Back of the Postcard

Felicia enjoys dance class, playing with Cousin Kiana, and three days of preschool!

Jocelyn plays soccer and piano, enjoys third grade, horses, reading, and handbells.

Karen’s been promoted at Crossbow, plays bells, bakes awesome cookies, and bought a Prius.

David went to Turkey with Rotary, coaches soccer, volunteers too much, and prays for snow.

Wishing you … Peace, Love, and Happiness!

These pictures are also available on Flickr … plus about 28000 more, if you have privileges (mostly available for the asking, so ask!).

Felicia often wants to “join in” when I lead a prayer before dinner. Tonight, she was particularly passionate about a few things:

Thank You for People
Thank You for God
Thank You for Jesus Christ
Thank You for the Grinch
And for the People who saw the Grinch
And Thank You for Songs.

The San Jose Sharks played a rare matinée game this afternoon, battling the evil Dallas Stars in a daytime hockey game at San Jose Arena. It was the perfect opportunity to take Felicia to a game!

We had a great time, and she really enjoyed dancing to the music and watching the game. Although, she also enjoyed watching the ice crew shovel snow off the playing surface during commercial breaks.

She also danced around the concourse with our preschool friend Kate, who was also attending the game with her dad. And before the game, Felicia donated a pretend kitchen set and a game of Sorry! to the Marine’s “Toys for Tots” campaign.

This picture is also available on Flickr.

Oh yeah … the Sharks lost the game, but Devin Setoguchi scored the first goal of the game, so Felicia really loved that!

With the arrival of the holidays, Felicia has finally been getting into the art projects at our SJPPNS preschool. Today she made a Christmas ornament, and insisted that it was four our outside tree … placed in the front yard in true Willow Glen Charlie Brown fashion.

She also insisted that the “C” shape of the ornament was for the letter C in her name … and maybe Christmas, too, but she’s not sure.

This picture is also available on Flickr.

We love the advent calendars, and our collection continues to grow each year.

As calendars and numbers come into focus for Felicia, she’s become excited by advent calendars, too. At a party earlier this week, someone gave our girls one of those candy treat advent countdowns. The package is sufficiently unlike all of the other non-food-based counting apparatuses we have, so it took a day or two for Felicia to want to open it. When she asked today, I resisted, not wanting to unleash the milk chocolate beast just yet. While Jocelyn wants to “keep” her chocolates – something about putting them on our gingerbread house – I suspected Felicia would just want to eat them all.

So I told her we’d wait until after dinner. She then pressured me to at least let her color on the back of the package, where the marketers have conveniently printed a black-on-white image suitable for crayons. I relented, figuring it couldn’t do any harm.

But next she asked if she could open the markers in the box. Apparently, she’d decided that the candy rattling in the calendar was possibly a set of crayons or markers you could use to color the back of the box. So now I had to prove there weren’t pens in the box. So we opened Door #1, but not before I explained the whole chocolate thing and made it clear that we weren’t going to eat any until after dinner.

Not exactly lip gloss for Mrs. Claus, but I do think that a “marker-a-day advent” would in fact be a brilliant thing to have!

Felicia has been absolutely desperate this week to play board games. Every game we own has been spread around the upstairs loft at one time or another over the last few days … even the ones she has no chance of being able to play.

While she can compete in Candyland, Chutes & Ladders, and other “non-strategy” games, she prefers to try her hand at Horseopoly, Cranium Cadoo, and Herd Your Horses. And most recently, SORRY!

Since board games are awesome developmental tools, I’ve been helping her “play” these games anyway, resulting great amusement … and in a significantly large mess on the floor.

The other day, she spread out the game of SORRY! as she might imagine playing it. We had not discussed the actual “SORRY!” cards or needing to draw a certain number to get out of the starting space, because … well, you try explaining it to a three-year-old. We started playing and I quickly realized she had number-sorted all of the cards, and I was basically moving my token five places at a time. I turns out there are a lot of “5″ cards.

After playing for a while, I asked her to put the game away, which she actually did quite willingly. A few hours later, I discovered that her number-sorting had been quite thorough … like you might ignore the extra jokers, blank cards, and directions in your standard deck of 52, she had permanently “discarded” the “SORRY!” cards. Lucky I found them!

Equally amusing is the way she apologized. Of course, she said she was sorry.

Music is a big deal in this house, and Christmas Carols are even more important — and a lot more prevalent this time of year.

With Christmas music — as with a lot of our other musical genres — individual CDs can be in such heavy rotation that you’d expect them to disintegrate in the player. This can in turn lead to a bit of parental stir-craziness.

But not this year! … knock on wood … We’ve got a Roku SoundBridge, which Karen had given me for my birthday earlier this year. It’s awesome! This wireless music player accesses the music collection of MP3s on our home computer and can play any of our songs whenever we tell it to. No CD’s to scratch, no cases to step on, no … and it has a “random play” feature! Theoretically, we can go about 16 hours without repeating a single song, and the simplicity and variety is appreciated by all of us!

Yay!