First solo Christmas in my life. DS and DDIL are with her mother in a small town in Iowa, 2 hours from Des Moines, since she works at a nursing home and gets little time off around Christmas. I know that if I'd mentioned to a few church friends that I'd be alone today I could have gotten an invite but this feels right. DDIL's "official" family celebration will be in January and I'll join them and we all saw each other when the girls were in The Nutcracker the weekend before last.
I've had plenty of loud, lavish family celebrations and I treasure them all but most of the cast of characters have moved away or died. Siblings are in SC- didn't feel like braving the roads with so much highway washed out and only partly repaired. Yesterday's church service was enough celebration for me.
And- a gift from out of the the blue- an article from the MSN news feed about CS Lewis' writings on Christmas that totally fit into my sermon for Sunday. In one essay on Christmas he asks, “Can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers?”. I "borrowed" a lot from this article, with attribution, and sermon is now in good shape.
Time to clean the kitchen.