Christmas in our Hearts

A weekend ago we came home from a night out and found this piece of artwork hung in The Johnson Art Gallery (aka the small white fridge in our yellow kitchen.) The girls had watched Christmas with the Cranks, which had inspired Eliza to draw a winter themed picture even though we had been able to wear flip flops with our jeans and sweatshirts to the beach that week.

Indeed that week did feel Christmas-like, in our hearts, though not our climate, as a huge box of wonderful fall goodies had arrived from our friends the Bowlers in the United States. It was chock full of the can’t-get-it-in-China kind of things that made it all the more special. Special stuff from special people (who incidentally will add another special person to their family early next summer… yeah for #3!)

The girls have been honing their Christmas list for Grandma in the U.S. and for Mom and Dad (although unbeknownst to them their gifts from a certain shop with big red bags that hails from Michigan Ave and specializes in historical fiction and characters made the grand global journey back with us from Illinois in August!)

Once a week at bedtime we’ve been working our way through a thoughtful kids devotional book, which is careful outlining our need for a saviour. The book, full of realistically rendered oil paintings and worthy of coffee table status, was a Christmas-in-August gift from Great Grandma Lil who wanted to see the girls open her gift to them. At the end of each rather long chapter is a list of questions. After the first chapter about how God gave us the Bible as a special gift, we asked Bea the first of 15 questions about the chapter.

“Bea, who is the bible a special gift from?”

“Lilly Lew,” she answered!

“No, Bea, its from God,” Millie quickly corrected her.
“Oh, God,” said Bea, and then added, “and Lilly Lew!”