Its a Miracle!

The title of this post could refer to a lot of things at this time of year.

Most importantly, it refers to the miracle of that original Christmas.  With appropriate deference to that fact, there are a few other miracles that occurred around the Benson house this holiday season.

Our home survived the Progressive Dinner (and Hurricane Brett).  While Jaime always does a great job making our home look festive, this year we had the touch of a pro.  Jaime's mother Mary lent us her decorating efforts as we prepared to host 70 ladies for the main course of a Relief Society (church women's group) progressive dinner.  Turns out that there are some benefits to dragging your feet in buying new furniture when you move into a new house . . . when it came time to clear out the family and living rooms to make way for the long banquet tables needed for the party, we didn't have that much of our own stuff to haul into the garage.  By the evening of the dinner, the house looked amazing (and we had acquired several new custom-made wreaths, lighted banister garlands and decorative holiday doohickey-thingamajigs.  But after the party was over, my real fear was that these new decorations wouldn't be able to withstand the constant destructive force that is our 18-month-old Brett, for whom every glass ornament is a ball waiting to be thrown and everything else is a hammer.  But Brett seemed to content herself this year with getting into things she could actually eat (she's getting better at realizing what is and isn't edible) so our baubles and ornaments survived mostly intact.   [Unfortunately I don't think anyone took any pictures of the decorations this year.  We are firing our family historian.]

I survived "O Holy Night."  Since I was 11 or so, I have been singing "O Holy Night" at Christmastime, but mostly in a choir or small ensemble.  I learned a very nice three-part harmony arrangement from Salt Lake Children's Choir director Ralph Woodward, Jr., and I can't count the times that I've sung it in a choir or even an impromptu trio of Benson siblings.  But I've never really done it as a solo in a public performance outside small group settings. This year I agreed this year to sing it as a solo in our church Christmas concert, to which the community was invited.  I sing solos somewhat often, so that's not that unusual, and this piece is not a particularly difficult piece.  But almost more than any other piece I've sung, everyone knows there is a particularly high note at the end -- and, if you're like me, you probably judge the quality of a rendition of this song primarily on how well the person hits that ONE BIG NOTE at the end.  And so the pressure of nailing that note at the end ratchets way up.  In the end, it went well and I didn't bomb the high note.  But I'm going to try to avoid this piece in the future.

We survived the night before Christmas and Christmas morning.    On Christmas eve, we were joined by Jaime's parents, Stan and Mary, for our traditional tepanyaki dinner.  Actually its the first time we've done tepanyaki on Christmas eve, but apparently we weren't the only family with small kids that had the same idea of not having to cook that night.  When we got there at 5 p.m., nearly every table there had several small children.  After dinner, we had an enjoyable visit from our friends the Weymouths (who joined our traditional  mostly-reverent reading of the Christmas story).

After getting the kids into bed (with more than one threat that we would call Santa and tell him to skip our house if we didn't see an immediate improvement in obedience) we set about setting up for the production the following morning. Thanks to amazon.com and UPS, we had been accumulating boxes for the past several months, which meant that Jaime and I held an impromptu pre-unwrapping party on Christmas eve in which we got to carefully open boxes and figure out what we had purchased back in September.

By around 10:30 p.m., Stan and Mary were asleep and I had just started the assembly of my project for the night:

I assumed this would be a relatively quick assembly, but when I climbed into bed just before 2 a.m. (cursing the seemingly endless number of decals that had to be added) I realized I should have seen whether Toys R Us had an assembly service.  But the best thing about this ride-in car?  Notice what is printed before "Escalade" in the picture?  Yes, this little baby is a HYBRID.  Never mind that the actual toy car is 100% electric battery powered.  The makers of this toy car realized that the yuppie parents who buy these things might feel uncomfortable with their kids driving around in something that is a toy version of a real gas guzzler.  So to assuage that parental guilt the manufacturer now includes an additional set of decals in the box that clearly label this baby as a Hybrid.  I guess that means our kids can drive in the carpool lane now.

When the kids woke up, we let them go down and investigate what was downstairs before their grandparents woke up:

I admit I chuckled pretty hard at Davis's exclamation of "Its a miracle!" when he noticed something he liked in the corner:

A friend of his has one of these Razor electric quads, and we'd taken Davis to ride it so we could see whether he could manage it safely.  He rode it like a champ, so we had located one on CraigsList that was in great condition and had brand new batteries.  This little thing is quick.

And Kate and Brett are loving their Hybrid Escalade.  It even has a working AM/FM radio.

For my Christmas present I learned that the pop I heard in my knee when doing a tug-of-war earlier this year was the tearing of my medial meniscus.  So I will have the opportunity to have knee surgery sometime next month.  LUCKY ME!  But I'm sure I will survive that too. 

So we survived and have had a wonderful Christmas this year!  We wish everyone a very happy new year!