New Holiday Traditions?

We've been a bit of a hobo family on the holidays. Drive here, drive there, camp at home for once every so often.

But we have few of our own traditions, as in our own family traditions. We talk every so often about these things but this recent talk was different. We received a gift earlier this past week from a dear family we're friends with.

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra, The Christmas Trilogy, which includes 3 of their CD's along with a DVD they did called The Ghosts of Christmas Eve. If you haven't heard their music, you must, it's really wonderful, a 60 peice orchestra along with rock and pop performers and singers. They do a lot to expand the more traditional music they play. Their website is below:

Trans-Siberian Orchestra Website Link

So we watched the DVD on Saturday morning and loved every second of it. E was literally wrapped up in it, as in "shhhh, I'm listening". Both of us wanting it to go on longer when it was over and agreeing that we finally need to go see them in concert. They tour every holiday season.

And there in lies a tradition we talked about. We do the more traditional holiday 'tours', such as the Symphony playing Pops, the Nutcracker, etc, so it's not such a far stretch, we've just never settled on 'our thing' to do each year. But this year we talked about how our tradition when Magpie comes would be to watch this DVD on Christmas Eve, by the fire, eating homemade cookies and sipping cocoa or hot apple cider, then letting her pick a present to open when it was all over.

Perhaps, we'll finally start anually doing the Tree Trimming Party we held that year and loved too.

Magpie, nearly every week someone we care about talks about you, asks about you, in addition, we talk about you with each other. Waiting for you to come home is so hard, it's lonely at times and we wonder how long it's really going to take. When you finally do come home I know it will be like everything that's been in limbo for us will start to take shape, our own family will have been born and with it, our traditions will begin too. Where ever time leads us, we take solice in the fact that we'll be a family.

Till you come home, we'll keep you close in our thoughts. YOu cannot imagine how close you are to us, in our hearts, our minds, in what we plan for the future and how we've learned to think about all the present world currently holds. You are in essence a guiding force for us.