I hope New Year's is THIS great!

Christmas has come and gone. But Jesus is still the KING! Yay! Christmas was quite an adventure this year. It was Justin and I’s first Christmas as a married couple and it turned out perfectly! We spent Christmas Eve morning with his Dad and stepmom (Rachel). We had the biggest breakfast ever and got tons of great gifts. Rachel made us the coolest quilt. It came from Wisconsin and in every other square it had a picture of us……..seriously soooo cute! We also got a chocolate fondue fountain. So, I forsee fondue parites in the future at the tyner household. Jo and I got beautiful matching gold bracelets and Justin got a scope for his new gun. Plus they topped it off with moo-lah………they really over did it, but they were seriously the best presents! Then we headed over to Mom Wow’s house to celebrate that evening.
We attended the 6pm candlelight service at church and it was great. I’ve been to candle light services before but, not in a church this size! There we candles everywhere and I took a picture! Haha, is that rude??? Oh well, it was just too fabulous for words. Then we headed back to her house to snuggle up in our new matching pj’s which James and Justin decided to make as “grandpa-ish” as possible by tucking their shirts in and pulling the pants up to their chins…..what goobers! We opened our many presents which included some great devotional books (which impressed Justin so much he is actually planning to read!), power tools for Justin, and I got my bronzer from Beauticontrol that I wanted (thanks Ash!). We ate a good dinner and then wrapped up the night with the Christmas story (from Luke) out on the porch.
The best part was when we all tried to quote “Twas the night before Christmas…”. We made a game out of it, Ms. Joy would read the entire line except for the last word and we would try to remember what the word should be. For example, Ms. Joy, “The stockings were hung by the chimney with….” “SUPER GLUE!” no, “DUCT TAPE” no “CARE!” hahahhahaha! It was fun and silly.
We went back to our house to spend our first Christmas Eve night together. Santa decided to stuff our stockings before we even went to bed cause he didn’t want to have to get back up in the middle of the night……….hahah. I stuffed Justin’s and he stuffed mine. (We both stuffed Prissy’s). I woke up Christmas morning at about 5:45 (sooo early) and of course jumped on the bed until Justin got up chanting “Santa came, Santa came!” We ran to the tree and opened our gifts to each other. Since we have already exchanged our BIG presents with each other (a computer for me and a new rifle for him) we had “Christmas from the Heart” on Christmas morning.
I opened my handmade gift first. It was a cute little frame, double matted, with a black and white picture from our wedding. In the picture Justin is looking up at me and smiling real big. So around the matting he wrote something to the effect of: “To my Angel, I will never stop looking at you like you are my world”. I cried, of course and then was soooo excited for Justin to open his gift.
It was a book I made of letters that all his friends and family had written to him. They were so sweet and he definitely cried! He loved it and said it was the best gift he had ever gotten…….yay! So we then rummaged our stocking when we started our newest tradition of the underwear hat.
The rules are, whenever you go through your stocking, you must wear your new underwear on your head! I figure the kids will love it one day! Haha, but for now, we love it! When going through my stocking I had an extra little gift, from Santa of course.
It was the new Movado watch I had been wanting! Justin cheated…….but I wasn’t complaining! I guess you could say I cheated too! Haha.
There sitting by the tree was a paper ball snow-woman all dressed up in her “Mrs. Santa” outfit……….We may have to see if I can borrow it from her??? Anyway, it was just the best Christmas ever. But it wasn’t over yet. We loaded up the truck and headed up to see my family. We stopped on the way there to give Spencer (our hound dog) to his new owner. We cried so hard as we drove off. He was sitting in his cage on the back of the guy’s truck and we rode behind them for a while. Seeing his cute little face was too much for us and we got so sad. I love that dog, but I know we are doing the right thing by giving him to someone who has more time for him. I think he was just so lonely out there in our back yard. I just know he is soo happy right now running as fast as he can in the wide open. Well, after that we got to breakfast at mom and dad’s just in time.
I love breakfast! Then we opened gifts. I got a sweater from sharry and a cute picture frame with our name “Tyners” on it. Mom and dad adorned us with more moo-lah, which will help in paying off all the presents we bought everyone else! Thanks! We spent the night there and had fun just relaxing the next day. While everyone else went shopping Justin and I went to Ruby Tuesday’s to grab some lunch. We decided that we would start another Christmas tradition. Every Christmas we vow to go out to eat and leave someone a $100 tip. We both used to be servers so we know how great that would be. Plus I just really feel like God is going to use this in so many ways. I’ve always been told that people will listen to what you have to say if you meet their needs. If a hungry man is hungry while you speak to him, he is focused only on his grumbling belly. But if you feed him first, you have his full attention. Money is a great need of many around the holidays and I really think that if we try to meet this need, the person will be more likely to listen to our story or read our tract, etc. We decided that every year with the monetary gift we will write on a napkin, “The greatest gift of all, John 3:16 Merry Christmas!” Short and to the point. I hope it works, and I hope God continues to give us the ability and desire to do this. I think it will be a great lesson for our kids one day. I do want them to think of others at a time when “what am I gonna get” reigns. We didn’t stick around to see our waitress’s face when she got the tip, but she was workin her lil butt off, and she deserved it!
Soon, it was time to head back home but on the way we stopped to celebrate with Rachel’s family at her mom and dad’s house. We played dirty Santa and Grannie and Paw gave us another generous gift of moo-lah……….yeah I know it sounds like we got a lot, but most of it was spent before we got it! Hahahah! Our families are so generous and we are so very thankful! We finally made it home and snuggled up for a much needed slumber before coming back to work today. I hope you all had a marvelous Christmas! Can’t wait till New Year’s, Sharry and Josh are coming! And then mom and dad said they are gonna get to visit sometime after that! I’m so excited.