Our traditional Christmas Eve had included putting baby Jesus in the manger, baking cookies with Dad, going to children's mass, opening Godparent gifts and watching It's a Wonderful Life. Most years it also included me strongly encouraging Cal to wrap his presents for everyone. This year Cal finished his gifts a day early, but that wasn't the only tradition that we said goodbye to in 2020. Due to the pandemic we decided to forgo mass this evening. Meg's response to this decision was, "You know, ten year old me would have been pretty excited about that decision." To which Cal responded, "I'm not going to lie, but twenty-two year old me is pretty excited about that decision now." Cam and Brett agreed with Cal. We had probably outgrown children's Christmas Eve mass several years ago, not only because of the Heinisch children's ages, but also due to the death of Father Hire. We all loved his camel stories and questions to the children at mass. Father Andrew headed a nice Christmas Eve mass as well, but it just wasn't the same.
We did hold true to the other Heinisch family traditions, however. Cam helped with the cookies and for was granted the honor of putting baby Jesus in the manger. Meg usually requested that important responsibility. Everyone still had a Godparent gift to open and for the first time ever we had a visitor during this special family time. Winston had joined us for the week as the Lamles went to South Carolina to spend time with their own family. We had all enjoyed having him here and Meg had even picked out a gift for him that he was allowed to open along with Godparent gifts. It was a lot of fun watching him "squeak" his new reindeer and we decided that watching Winston open a toy on Christmas Eve should be our new family tradition. Afterward we finished the evening with It's a Wonderful Life realizing that in the Heinisch family it truly is.
Looks like a very nice Christmas Eve! Having Winston there was a new tradition that I envy. My cat is not as much fun.
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