Christmas '08 - yes I know I'm late.

Okay, I know I haven't posted since the infamous day when the Red Raiders forgot to show up their bowl game and let a stinkin' SEC team make them look silly...I've been in denial and trying to purge that memory from my mind...

But, in the midst of that, I have neglected to tell of our Christmas at all. A very good Christmas...lots and lots of traveling but got to see so much of our families, that it was worth it...

Here's a few of my favorite pics:

A got a real live MICROSCOPE for Christmas! She loves it!

A & W with my Grandmother - their great-grandmother.

Dear Hubby & W, playing with Football Man, W in his ever so cute underoos!

Dear Hubby, getting all choked up as he opens up his gift - a goat through Samaritan's Purse for a family in a third world country...this is what he asked for.

A just being goofy.....and kind of scary if you look at it long enough!

Uncle Kyle threatening to throw W into the Guadalupe River!

My angel boy - okay, so he's not an angel boy...but he looks like one in this picture so I'm sticking to my caption....

A in her new helmet - to protect her noggin' when she's roller skatin' on her new purple skates!

I also got to be part of a very special event this year...it was our first Christmas without our Ma...last Christmas, none of us would have guessed we'd be spending it without her this year. My mom, aunts, and uncles (my mom is the oldest of 8 kids) decided to take everything that my Ma had left on this earth (which was about $1200 - and that's including her IRS stimulus check from 2008!) and use it to make some special memories this Christmas. You see, my Ma, from the world's perspective, was very poor...she had very little in the physical or worldly sense...and yet, somehow, she is the richest person I have ever known.

Anyway, our family rented a lodge at a camp ground near Fredricksburg and all that could met there the weekend after New Years...there were 53 of us there. This is just my aunts, uncles, and cousins, people...there are lots of us. Anyway, it was a very nice time on Friday and Saturday...but there was just something missing to me - my Ma. I was really dreading this weekend because I knew it would be so hard, that I would miss her more than ever and her absence would be so real...the easy thing would have been not to go. But I knew I needed to, and I knew we, as a family, needed to get through this together, so that's what we did...

Then, on Saturday night, a really cool thing happened. I love my family, I have always loved my family...we have always been very close and stick together through thick and thin...but there was some unspoken fears floating around that now that Ma was gone, that closeness would begin to erode away. Saturday night changed all of that. Most of us ended up sitting around outside, with a fire going in a big grill (burn ban, no campfires!), just talking...and when I say "just talking" - I mean talking in a way that people started sharing crazy childhood stories, laughing, talking about all of the lives my Ma had touched, how she had been the hands and feet to Jesus for so many and then telling each other about those specific individuals that Ma had touched ...that evolved into many of us sharing our feelings about Ma, about losing her, about what this family meant...one of my uncles had gotten a single word from God to describe Ma and her life - Vast. Vast in the sense of how large God had made her territory (Prayer of Jabez, anyone?)...vast in the sense of how deep and how wide and how amazing her love was for all of us...vast in the sense of how far reaching her influence was and vast in her legacy and in her love for Jesus. We prayed together, we sang together, we laughed, we cried, we listened to one of my uncles play the harmonica....the sense of our common ties was so strong, you could feel it...and the sense of how much Ma loved all of us was just as strong...

I left that weekend feeling like I had re-bonded with my roots, with my zany, eccentric, beautiful, and amazing family. I left there still missing my Ma but feeling a peace that I haven't felt since she died. I left there knowing Ma was smiling at us from Heaven, saying "I love you more!"

The only picture I have where you can see most of us...we were playing the "Right" game - a very strange little tradition Ma started many years ago.