The Christmases before Christmas

Happy New Year! We've been really busy these past few weeks with driving. Up and down California for family Christmases, all before we even celebrate Christmas! Our celebration of Christmas is on January 7th, but this is sort of nice because we get a lot of the gift giving and familial Christmases out of the way, and we have time to really enjoy and spiritually prepare for the Nativity of Christ. Christmas with us starts for Advent, a time of fasting and prayer, but not as strict as the Lent before Pascha. We do an Advent wreath, and finally...

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Celebrating St. Lucia

I can only imagine our spawn's thoughts this morning. "Why is mommy's head on fire? What is that smell? You guys see this, right? Her head is on fire. Oh, they got out the tea set. But that doesn't smell like tea. What are those yellow buns? Wait, why are they singing before eating breakfast? WHAT IS GOING ON?!" Well what's going on is the Feast of St. Lucy, or St. Lucia, or Santa Lucia depending on how multicultural you want to be. A lot of Orthodox don't celebrate this feast day, but it's a good Norse holiday (big in Sweden), which is Germanish,...

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Celebrating St. Nicholas Day!

Hello again, to all my friends! I'm glad you came to play... You might be a parent if you get that reference. Anyway, today is the Feast of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, Bishop of Myra! Now, December 6th is his birthday on the New Calendar. Not too many people are familiar with this, so here's a brief explanation. Feel free to skip if you get it: Before 1582 everyone used what was called the Julian Calendar. That was all hunky dory, but the math is a bit off. Don't ask me how to explain this stuff, all I know is "the Gregorian calendar is more...

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Happy Black Friday!

Ok, yes, I'm only updating on holidays, but really, I don't think you guys are so interested in our day to day lives where we go to work, school, and get our diaper changed (depending on which family member you are). So yeah, updates are far more likely after a celebration. Lucky for anybody who loves the chubby cheeks of the family prince, I think almost every weekend from her to Nativity has some feast. Also, some of these pictures are probably duplicates from when OrthoMom got annoyed at how little I update and so loaded them all up to Facebook....

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Happy Friendsgiving!

So last time y'all tuned in it was Halloween. Today, by which I mean a week ago, was Friendsgiving! The table was set with this amount of food for the past week. I have to say I'm pretty proud of my turkey: No basting, and I have been told by several people that it was the most moist turkey ever. Alton Brown doesn't steer his bros wrong. So we had good food. Today the turkey carcass will be turned into broth which will season the stuffing at Thanksgiving in a few weeks, where we'll be watching the REAL Thanksgiving parade and not settling...

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