A Season for Celebrating

This week has been filled with celebration. Brandon started getting credit card applications in the mail for the first time in his life (celebrate the first one, and then rue the day it came for all the ones that are yet to come throughout his lifetime). That and all the paperwork being completely submitted for my degree were reason enough for us to celebrate (yeah, it doesn't take a lot for us to find a reason to pull out the Martinellis and dip strawberries in nutella)! To top it all off, we finally got the approval for our mortgage loan and are back into the house hunting game. Finding and closing on a house will be a celebratory blog post to look forward to in the future :)

Celebratory food. I finally got around to cooking a real dinner for Brandon (chicken curry with naan bread and cilantro infused rice) which was followed with some delicious dessert courtesy of Brandon.

Murphy Oil Corp. had their annual Christmas Party. It took us back to the days of dressing up for high school dances. We had a great time, and it was really nice to meet a lot of the people from work that Brandon talks about frequently. The company had arranged for a photographer to come in and take photos of everyone, so...we'll count that as our incredibly informal Christmas card to our dear family and friends who stumble across the blog. Yay for Murphy making that easier for us ;)

Most importantly though, we are enjoying having a season dedicated to celebrating the birth and life of our Savior Jesus Christ. We have been doing a modified version of the 12 days of Christmas for a less active family that Brandon is assigned to home teach in our apartment complex. We have never met them, but we have really enjoyed dropping off little pieces of a nativity scene with different stories about the significance of each one every night. We hope to meet them at the end of all of this and hope that this really helps them draw closer to Christ this Christmas season. We hope that everyone takes a moment to pause during the hustle and bustle of the holiday season to reflect on how we can better receive the gift of Christ in our lives, and to ponder what gift we can give to Him this coming year.