It's Not Christmas Without The Messiah

Yesterday we spent the day with my family for our Christmas celebration. Since Christmas came on Sunday this year and since there are several pastors in the family who live several hours apart, it wasn't possible to get everyone together on Christmas Day this year. Instead, we decided to wait until the Thursday after Christmas to get together. Besides the food and presents, the highlight of our family's Christmas is to sing from Handel's Messiah.

My family has been singing the Messiah since I was ten years old. My mom taught us to sing "For Unto Us a Child is Born" for our church's Christmas Eve service that year. My mom sang soprano, my dad sang bass, I sang tenor, and my younger sister sang alto. It was a hit, and we've been learning new songs since, adding siblings as they grew old enough to learn the parts. A few years ago we put on a Christmas concert and went to three churches to sing seventeen songs from the Messiah. That was the first year that all of my siblings (plus one sister-in-law) sang together.

I have had such wonderful times singing with my family. I sang in several other choirs when I was growing up such as homeschool choir, church choir, and the 4-H chorus, but singing with my parents and siblings will always be something I cherish. So yesterday, after the food and before the presents, my mom passed around the books and popped in the accompaniment CD, and we sang until we were hoarse.

I wanted to share this video of one of the songs we sang yesterday called "And the Glory of the Lord." In this video, my parents, siblings, husband, in-laws, future in-laws, children, nieces, and nephews are all crowded into the living room at my parents' house. We are packed so tightly in there that many have to sit on the floor, but nobody minds. Not everybody sings, but anyone who wants to is welcome to join in. We are a close-knit family who loves to be together and to sing together, and even though we haven't sang together since last Christmas, we still know how to make beautiful music together as we worship God. After all, what would Christmas be without the Messiah?

Christmas Day

This was the best Christmas I think we've ever had, or at least it's up there somewhere in the top three. :) We went all out and bought iPod Touches for all six of the kids. They had all wanted one, even Timothy. When we had them make their wish lists this year, they all put one on the top (except for Jay, who asked for a Zune instead). They weren't really expecting one, though.

We had so much fun making it impossible for the kids to guess what they were getting. We wrapped them each differently in different sizes and shapes of packages. I wrapped a bag of lentils around one and it felt like a bag of sand. Another I packed inside a box of old books. One was in an oatmeal container, another inside a box of macaroni. Some of them made noise when shaken, others did not.

We also got them each a unique cover so they would be able to tell them apart. I put the covers in gift bags wrapped in tissue. They were so lightweight that some of the kids questioned whether there was anything in them at all!

Last night we allowed them to each unwrap one present--a pair of pajamas--but the had to wait until today to get their iPods. They were so excited and they've spent all day playing with them.

I didn't used to realize what iPods were. I thought they were just music players with a touch screen. With all the things that they can do, we didn't just give our kids music players. We gave them each a gaming system along with dozens of games, a camera, a video recorder, a TV, a flashlight, a Bible, lots of books, a phone with the ability to text, a computer, toys, musical instruments, a pedometer, an alarm clock, a calender, and I don't even know how much more! There are tons of free apps to download.

The first thing we did, though, was to set parental controls and take away the web browser. They don't really need to have Internet access all the time--we like to have adult supervision for that. But they can still access anything that has an app, like Facebook. That means we'll have to make sure they don't play on their iPods when we are having school.

We did let them take them to church but they have been strictly warned that if they are using their iPods, they'd better be using the Bible app or taking notes with it! We had a beautiful Christmas morning service, btw. We took communion with a loaf of French bread and sparkling grape juice in goblets to make it special. I know that Jesus actually would have used unleavened bread, but the French bread just looked so pretty. There were candles everywhere in the church, although we didn't light the ones in the windows because we didn't want to catch the curtains on fire.

We played Christmas carols and sang some specials. I was going to sing "Every Valley" but I've had a cold lately. After leading worship my voice wasn't strong enough to sing a difficult song like that.

I took a nap when we got home and then made a delicious pecan pie to go with our Christmas dinner. I also made a sugar-free jello dessert for Erick. He's not sticking entirely to his diet right now, but he is still watching what he eats.

I got to use every one of my Christmas presents today--a Ninja blender (to turn some pecans to dust), my toaster (because the bread for the sandwiches we had for lunch was still in the freezer), a set of Eggies (for egg salad), and a stock pot (for the sweet potatoes).

Erick hasn't had a chance to use his new Garmin GPS system yet. We haven't been anywhere yet, except for church, and we know how to get there. We've named it Judy because the female voice that tells you where to turn sounds like a Judy.

Christmas isn't entirely over for us, though--later this week we're going to visit our families. I can't wait!

Christmas break

Today is the first day of Christmas break. I don't have a lot planned for this week, but we do have some cleaning to catch up. Of course, that's nothing different--it seems we always have cleaning to catch up on.

I really don't have that much else going on. I'm only posting in my blog because I haven't posted in it much lately. I've made more posts to my Greene County Daily World blog than I have this one lately. I've even posted to my dream blog more than I have this one! I never thought I would be posting to three different blogs.

I think I'll go clean my room.

The future of online content

This semester, I have really been wondering what will happen with Internet content in the future. So far, media technologies are still fairly new. All throughout my textbook for my Intro to Journalism class I've looked at timelimes that have shown the progression of different inventions and technologicial discoveries, from Nikola Tesla and his radio coils to LePrince's motion pictures to Zuckerburg's Facebook. A hundred years ago the world looked very different. Even fifty years or fifteen years ago, things looked very different. I have a photo album of pictures of my mother when she was a little girl, and they were all in black and white. There are home videos of me as a little girl, and they are all on big giant reels in my parents' attic. They are silent videos because home video cameras back then apparently didn't have audio capabilities. In comparison, my kids have hundreds of digital photos and videos of them on my blog and on Facebook.

My dad loves genealogy. When I was a kid we would hunt for photos of relatives and read through old letters that gave us a glimpse into their lives. Those were real treasures to us because they were rare.

If my grandkids want to know about me, they won't have to rely on stories handed down through my kids or by finding my box of love letters (which I really hope they don't find!) They could read my blog or notes I have written on Facebook. But what about the next generation or the generation after that? What will happen to my online content when I am dead?

I would love to be able to look back at my great-great-great-grandmother's Facebook page or read her blog or wach digital videos of my ancestors as they played in the hose when they were children. Will that information still be around a hundred years from now? A thousand?

What will happen to all of the pictures and posts that I've uploaded in my lifetime? If they are still available, we will have a rich world. We will be able to pass our knowlege and insights down to generations in a way that has never been possible in the past. The stories of our lives will be around forever rather than fading into oblivion, assuming they don't get dumped.

That's my fear--that eventually all of the old data will get dumped in order to make way for new generations to upload their stuff. Will my blog still be around a thousand years after I've stopped posting in it for my descendents to discover (assuming this world lasts another thousand years!), or will somebody out there decide it's no longer necessary?

I've actually checked into this on Facebook. They say that when you die, your family can set your page as a memorial and only your friends can see your page. I would guess you can't approve more friends, though, so any descendents I might have after I died would be out of luck.

Laundry!

Yesterday we finally got a dryer. Ours went out a few days ago. It was taking longer and longer to dry a load of clothes. At one point I was having to run the dryer three whole cycles just to dry one load of clothes. Finally, it just quit heating up altogether.

Erick tried to fix it. Some of my Facebook friends suggested that replacing a heating coil was an easy fix. Erick is pretty handy about fixing things, but one thing he hasn't had any experience fixing is dryers. That may be because his parents dried their clothes on a clothesline when he was growing up and he didn't get the chance to learn how to fix one.

He gave it a good try, though. He looked it up on the Internet and took it all apart, but when he was done with it, it didn't work at all. Our neighbor came over and looked at it, too, and I guess neither of them could figure it out.

So we bought a used one last night. Our neighbor had told us about a Facebook group that posted classified ads in our area and we found a used one for $75. It's nothing fancy, but it dries clothes, and we are waaaay behind right now. I haven't seen stacks of laundry like this since we lived in the trailer and I had to take my laundry to my in-law's house each weekend. That was back when we only had two babies. By spring, we'd literally have laundry stacked to the ceiling. (Remember, they didn't have a dryer!) In the winter, we'd take home baskets of wet laundry after washing it all load by load in their wringer washer, and we'd put it on the front porch so it would stay fresh-smelling until we could get it all dried. Then we'd bring each load in, one at a time, and let it thaw. We'd drape them over chairs and drying racks and cabinet doors until they dried, and then bring in another load to thaw. Our clothes were always stiff back then.

We have come such a long way since then. This new dryer might not be top-of-the-line, but at least I can dry a load of clothes in a reasonable amount of time. By the end of the day I except to have a mountain of clean laundry instead of a mountain of dirty laundry.