Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Snowed out of Church

Today we looked at the roads in our town and thought, Those are totally drive-able. So we piled into the car and headed north toward our church, which is about an hour away. Halfway there, and surprisingly suddenly, the roads turned into a terrifying tundra of ice, snow, flying chips of frozen road, and clearly incapable drivers. We eventually gave-in, bought Noah another Christmas gift (don't tell), and came home. We couldn't even eat at the Jack and the Box we hit the last two years on the way to our church's candle light service (our own special Gorman tradition, abolished so quickly) so we hit the Burgerville in our own town when we got back.

Once home, Paige called somebody and found the time for a worship service at a nearby church, the one that houses Noah's preschool, and tonight we'll head over there. At this point in my life I can miss a single Sunday without losing much sleep, but a Christmas Eve without a church service... just the thought of it bums me out. Now we'll try to mitigate that with another church's service. I know what my mom is thinking: Same God. And she's right. But these people might just sing the wrong songs, and I'll have to deal with that. Also, they don't know how challenging we are to welcome to a church; Paige doesn't like talking to strangers, so they can't come up and greet her without making her uncomfortable. I do like talking to, well, everybody, so if they don't talk to me I'll feel dissed. Plus, they have to be willing to tolerate some wiggles from Noah if he has a tough time, but we'd like them to acknowledge it if he's wonderfully behaved in church (which he often is. It's a toss-up). How can these poor people possibly win? Well, Mary had to go through labor in a cave behind a small-town Motel 6, so I guess we don't have much to complain about.

No matter what, we can come home to another family tradition my parents invented: The Pajama Fairy. We get new PJs every Christmas Eve, and we found some pretty awesome ones for Noah, so no matter what, we'll all settle down for a cozy, fleecy, toasty long-winter's nap.

I hope all of you get to celebrate as you see fit, and I hope you get to sing that one song you're really hoping for this Christmas.

1 comment:

Jed Carosaari said...

Our dinner was at the same time as the Christmas Eve service of the church I've been attending, so couldn't go to that. So I was all set to attend a Midnight Mass in the area- only to find out that the local Catholics are indelibly lame here, and none of them have Midnight Masses! They are all around 9 PM, which is a totally undevoted time to have Christmas Eve mass, and a time that had already passed by the time I realized it :-(