merry christmas! {CELEBRATE This Week: 172}

I'm glad you are here to celebrate! 

Share a link to your blog post below and/or use #celebratelu to share celebrations on Twitter. Check out the details here. Celebrate This Week goes live on Friday night around 10(ish). Consider it as a weekend celebration. Whenever it fits in your life, add your link. 

Please leave a little comment love for the person who links before you.

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Christmas is love in action. Every time we love, every time we give, it's Christmas.

--  Dale Evans

This is one of my favorite pictures. It was taken Christmas Day 2009, four years before Jay became part of our forever family.

The girls were home for less than two years. It was becoming evident that adoption isn't always a warm and fuzzy experience. It was a dark time for me. I'm glad I didn't know then that the road to healing was going to be years, maybe even decades. Unfortunately there are many untold stories of adoption. There are too many partial stories -- those that romanticize the healing process.

The truth is, healing from trauma is gnarled and ugly. Facing the hurt and harm, and then choosing to move on can be, in many ways, even more painful than the original trauma. Christmas, though, it always gives me hope. 

It is always, always the best day of the year for our family. We stay home all day long. Everyone maintains self-control. We've yet to have a meltdown, an argument, or a fit on Christmas Day. It is a modern Christmas miracle. 

I am not being dramatic. Every Christmas we are blessed with a miracle of an entire day of FUN. 

It is how Andy and I choose to live. We live FUN. It takes strong and rooted faith to live fun.

Fun is Andy's One Little Word for the third year running. For awhile I thought it was fluff, and he was mocking One Little Word. Now I realize that it takes true strength to keep living fun year after year.

On this holy weekend, I celebrate that Andy and I lead our family in living FUN. We are proof that even in this world where horrific things happen to little kids, we can believe (with a know-so hope) in complete healing. We celebrate the baby in the inn with no room, because He came to offer hope that it is possible to turn darkness into light. 

This is why Andy and I choose live FUN even on the not-so-fun days. On Christmas Day all of our kids choose to live it too. It gives me hope that one day they will learn to live FUN on every day of the year.

Add your celebration here: