Christmas in Review

I hope everyone had a great Christmas! John and I definitely did, even though we really missed home. We woke up late (10:30!) and opened our stockings. After that, I made an egg, sausage and cheese casserole and some coffee cake. We got ready for the day, ate breakfast (with a side of mimosas) and then opened presents. The rest of the day was spent talking to family and watching Christmas greats like A Christmas Story and The Santa Claus . :o) One of the presents John got me was Evan Almighty, and we settled down to watch that late last night.

Unfortunately, neither of us were feeling very good today. John had a sore throat and was home from work. I have just felt lethargic all day. It’s only 8 PM, and I could easily go to sleep for the night right now. I need to be rested for tomorrow, because I have a lot to get ready before we leave for Paris on Friday.

We did get a bit of a surprise today — about 1″ of snow fell in the late morning/early afternoon. It was very pretty but also slippery! I didn’t take any photos of the snow today, but these are from our snowfall that had accumulated by Christmas Eve.

We made snow angels!

I tried to capture some of the snow falling, but it’s hard to capture white on white.

Here’s our Christmas Eve dinner. We had twice baked potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, cranberries, rolls, strawberry jello salad and champagne. It was delicious!

And finally, here we are before heading out to church:

We went to two church services on Christmas Eve. The first was at 7 PM and was held at the Episcopal Church on post. The service was WAY too long for a Christmas Eve service. It did not let out until 8:50. In all that time, they didn’t have a sermon or even a homily. They did, however, have 5 LONG readings (oddly all about John the Baptist) each followed by a hymn.

The second service we went to was at 11 PM in Heidelberg at a German language Protestant church. When we were walking up, the bells in the steeple were ringing like crazy. They must have been ringing for at least 5 or 10 minutes. We think it was to announce the birth of Jesus.

The church itself was beautiful. It was ornate and sort of in a gothic style. The pews had a small candle at either end, and the organ was huge. The music during the service was fantastic. All the songs the choir sang were in English, but everything else was in German. At the end of the service, the pastor told us (in German) to go out into the holy night with our candles lit to be a light to the world. We walked all the way to John’s car with our candles lit.

This video clip I posted below is the song the choir sang at the very beginning of the service. Both John and I really enjoyed it. This version is performed by the Oslo Gospel Choir.

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I’ll try to write again before we leave for Paris. Bye for now!