Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas . . .

Which is what we've already been having around here! Our festivities started a week and a half ago with Jack and Noah's Christmas programs - school and church - which Grandma and Grandpa Roisum made a special trip out from MN just to see. They got to see the church one, bu the school one was postponed due to weather - bummer! But it was great to have them here.

Here's the church one - they don't look very amused, do they? :)
They managed some smiles afterwards . . .

And here's the school one - which was amazing - it always is - they have the BEST musicals. And I love how they are always centered around JESUS. The school program is always one of my favorite parts of Christmas - it's an early present. And the boys loved it too. :)

Later that week, the boys had their Christmas party at school.

(Jack getting ready to dig in)

(Noah and one of his buddies)
And then the next day, we made a "difficult" decision to put Noah's hamster down. He was past his life expectancy, was blind, and had developed abdominal tumors. Easy for Mark and I to decide, but hard for Noah to accept. He accidentally heard Mark on the phone with the vet, realized what was going on, and crawled under Jack's bed (he can't fit under his) and cried and cried. Jack looked at Mark and said "dumb idea, Dad." At least we can always count on Jack's honesty. We had a long talk with him about quality of life for animals and he ended up being okay with it. Anyway, he wanted a final picture with him before we took him to the vet.

Then we headed out to a friend's house to make LEFSE! I had given Mark all of the required lefse making equipment last year for Christmas, and he was anxious to use it. So we teamed up with our friends and rolled lefse for a few hours! (This is her daughter - is she cute or what?)

(Nancy and Mark, the pros)

Next up: on Monday a mini-Christmas with my brother and his family before they headed off to MN. We got the whole family together in Spearfish at my mom and dad's. This is my totally adorable nephew with Jack. He doesn't like me. He does, however, love my kids. Which is heartwarming and frustrating at the same time. Lil' stinker.

I gave my brother a few things this Christmas, but this was the one of which I was most proud:All the cousins . . .

On Tuesday (still at my mom and dad's), we woke to spectacular scenery - a beautiful frost covering everything. We grabbed our cameras and headed out for some photos:

Got home Tuesday afternoon and we had even more frosty stuff at our house - it was BEAUTIFUL. An early Christmas present from God.

When we got home from mom and dad's, Murphy headed straight for a laundry basket and zonked out for 2+ hours. He was exhausted from wrestling with Molly for 2 days. Molly's become his best buddy (or as my mom would say, his hunk o'burnin love). :)

Lastly, I had previously mentioned showing you what a Roisum Christmas looks like. Here's our tree this year - a special gift to me and the boys from Mark - they wanted a flocked tree, and I wanted a big Fraiser - so we got both. It cost a small fortune, but it's beautiful and we have all loved it soooo much.

Here's my candy-cane-Christmas-tree collection and my two favorite Christmas frames.

I love Who-ville looking trees . . . .

And the stockings hung with care -

We are totally loving our Christmas break. We've had great time with family, are having some much-needed relaxation, great food and are looking forward to a quiet Christmas at home. Wish this could last for 3 more weeks!

May God bless your Christmas and may you take some time to reflect on why we celebrate. Merry Christmas!

Jack's at it again . . .

So on Thursday when we were getting ready to leave for school, I came out of my room and Jack looked at me and said "So I take it you aren't coming in the school today."

Me: "Why do you say that?"

Jack, looking me up and down, eyebrows raised: "Well you don't look pretty."

(at which point Noah mutters "Jaaaaaaack" - in the tone of "are you a total idiot?")

Now, granted I had my sweats on, hair piled on top of my head and hadn't showered yet. But still.

I said "Excuse me??"

And Jack continued unfazed: "Well most people don't come in the school looking like THAT."

Obviously, I did not set foot in the school that morning.

And on Friday, I made sure I had on full make up, hair done and acceptable attire. Jack gave his approval.

It's nice to know I can count on him to let me know when I'm getting a tad bit lazy with my appearance. What would I do without that guidance?!?

Jesus Loves The Little Children . . .

. . . all the children of the world! Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world . . .

And oh. Oh, how He loves them.

That was the predominant thought in my mind as I walked into the Operation Christmas Child processing center in Denver last week and saw this:


Not sure what Operation Christmas Child (OCC) is? Let me give you an overview. It's a ministry of Samaritan's Purse (run by Franklin Graham - Billy Graham's son). Their mission is to get Christmas presents to children in the poorest areas of the world who wouldn't otherwise recieve any presents - and presenting the gospel of Jesus Christ at the same time. This is accomplished by people throughout this country filling shoeboxes (one provided by the organization or your own) with toys and necessities. We started out a few years ago doing a couple boxes each year with the kids, and it's now turned into a huge family event at my mom and dad's - this year our family did 90+ boxes - it was amazing. My dad has such a passion for this ministry he's now in an Area Coordinator position.

Anyway, the boxes are collected by local churches and then shipped to 6 big processing centers throughout the country. The one closest to us is Denver. At these centers, the boxes are inspected - checked for "inappropriate items," taped shut and sorted into gender and age appropriate cartons. Then they are finally shipped off to the far corners of the world.

I had the opportunity to volunteer in Denver with my mom and dad this year. It was an incredible experience. When we arrived for work on Thursday morning, we were greeted with this sign:
Each morning, they post how many boxes have been processed at this particular center. WOW.

Ready for work!

Here's me at our sorting table.

The process went something like this: Dad would pull shoeboxes from cartons that had arrived from churches (we handled boxes from Texas, Montana and Iowa), make sure it had a gender/age tag on it and remove any shipping money from the box (OCC asks for $7 per box to help with shipping costs). Then he'd pass it to us.

Mom and I would go through and look for what they called inappropriate items - things such as food, candy that can melt, liquids, glass, snake toys (offensive in some countries), army toys (same reasoning), etc. We also filled in boxes that were lacking - various companies donate things such as crayons, paper, toothbrushes, toothpaste, toys and stuffed animals for us to use.

Here's what was hard: I found myself attached to every box I handled - I wanted to make each one PERFECT. I then found myself wanting to inspect ALL the boxes MYSELF. I'm kindof a control freak, and that doesn't work with this process. :) I realized on short order that I needed to RELEASE. Do my best, but not worry about all the boxes I couldn't do. Uggh.

Here's what else was hard: opening boxes that had very little in them. I'm talking 1-3 things. With tons of space left over. It made my heart hurt. A couple of them were just insulting, I thought. So of course we filled them as much as we could with what we were given. It was also interesting to see how few people included shipping money with their box. ?!? Go figure.

But then it was also awesome to see how much LOVE and CARE and THOUGHT went into some of these boxes - some were packed with everything imaginable, and packed so tight they probably required an engineer to get it all in there. And we'd see cute letters from kids and pictures of families, and those boxes made it easier to get through the bad ones.

And it was also amazing to know that when I closed a box up and taped it, I was the last person to touch it's contents before it reached a child in some far off country.

My dad was in his element there - talking with everyone he could meet. He talked with this guy for a long time - an OCC Chaplain from Libya who actually gets to go deliver boxes in far off lands. I'm so jealous. I totally want to go too.

Occasionally throughout the day, the staff stops everyone and they pray - over the boxes, the volunteers, the process, the kids who will receive them, etc. Well Mr. Libya asked MY DAD to lead the warehouse in prayer on Thursday. I, of course, was terribly proud and actually took a picture during the prayer. I figured God would understand. :)

On Friday morning when we arrived, here was the number we were greeted with!

I thought this area was cute:

Damaged boxes could go to the hospital to get fixed. I loved how each box was treated with the utmost respect and integrity.

Here was an example of a good one. I was going to take a picture of a bad one for an example, but I'd get so caught up in fixing it I kept forgetting to grab the camera.

Here you can see a semi outside ready to be unloaded and processed - and there were 5 or 6 of them outside. Awesome. And FYI, each carton contains anywhere from 14 - 23 boxes.

My dad got up on a ladder and got a shot of the whole operation . . . hard to capture the magnitude of it in a picture, however.

My mom and dad - aren't they cute?! My dad is working the scanning gun, which scans boxes with barcodes (you can print barcodes for your boxes online, tape it to the box, and then it's tracked so you can see where they go!)

These cartons are all ready to go to their kids.

That wall of cartons is 10 deep:

Oh, how He loves them.