A LampPost Flickering

Get the tissues handy...

Sadly, I have no Thanksgiving pictures to share with you today. Seth's curiosity about our camera caused him to extract the photo card, and it was still missing when we had to leave. Our family traveled to Ohio for Thanksgiving, for the first time in the 12 years we've been married. Since our families aren't close, we are required to travel for most of the holidays, so early on in our marriage, we staked our claim on Thanksgiving as a day for us to celebrate at home. When we were first married, we were both working retail, and as you all know, no one working retail gets the Friday after Thanksgiving off. (BTW, has it always been called Black Friday? I'd never heard that term before until this year, and I heard it everywhere.) So who wants to travel all over, only to have to leave on Thanksgiving Day to return home in order to get up at unheavenly hours to work the following day? Not us. So we didn't. And then we had kids, and I loved celebrating Thanksgiving with th

No, Caleb didn't find a Santa suit stashed away in a bottom dresser drawer. But true to his skeptical nature, all along he suspected something was up with the big guy dressed in red. "Mom, I don't think Santa Claus is real," he stated matter of factly last week. Gabe stood beside him, his brown eyes as big as chestnuts. When Rob and I first got married, long before our firstborn made his entrance into our Christmases, we had a Santa Claus discussion. His position: He grew up with lovely, childhood-belief-in-Santa memories, and he wanted his kids to have that same kind of wonderment and magic at Christmastime. My position: What if once our kids figured out that Santa wasn't real, that we lied to them, they begin to question whether or not God is real before their spiritual foundation has solidified? What's more, I never believed in Santa, and I was FILLED with Christmas magic and romance, long before December hit each year. We finally came to a compromise: we