You know you work in the Athletic Department when...

...you decorate the office for Christmas and still have a sports theme. For example, we have a string of Adidas sneaker-shaped lights (you know, those classic white ones with 3 blue stripes and the rubber of the sole coming up over the toe?)...And we have a whole bunch of "Air Santas," little plastic Santas flying through the air pretending to dunk basketballs. (They used to be on a string of lights, too, but then that string of lights broke, and now we have a dozen identical Air Santas stuck to the windows and mirrors and picture frames in the office.) At least we didn't have to decorate with the Highlander purple & gold theme! :)

Decorating the office for Christmas reminds me that I haven't gotten any of my own Christmas decorations out of their boxes yet at my own house...much less put any of them up. This is the first time I'll have a house of my own to decorate!!! Too bad the only decorations I own are a few strings of lights and multi-colored glass balls to hang on the tree that I don't have...I didn't have the wonderful genius of Tegan & Michael Kroening Diercks, to buy one after last year's Christmas for 7 dollars. So I guess maybe Sarah and I will decorate the hanging house plant in our front window instead. Or maybe we'll splurge on a real tree, or buy a little artificial one because then you don't have to remember to water it. :) But the most important Christmas decorating element of all, I don't have - a nativity scene. (Well, my landlady has a very cheesy light-up set for the yard, which she made sure she showed to me before they left...But I don't think I'll be putting that up anytime soon!) Note to self: find a nice nativity scene soon. We had one in every room growing up. Well, except the bathroom. :) And we had one that we would stick to our windows, too, kind of like a flannel-graph except all white and made out of plastic/rubber so it stuck to glass, not flannel. We always had a tree, but there was only one tree, and Jesus was everywhere you looked! I loved that about Christmas in our house. I want to make sure that I have at least one baby Jesus in a manger in my house this year, with Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and sheep, and angels, marvelling at the Great I Am, who created the universe, shrinking Himself down to the size of a crying infant who needed diaper changes, in order to draw us back into the heart of the God...simply astounding!

And you know what else is astounding? In exactly 17 days, I will once again be swept up in the arms of a tall and handsome man named Daniel, whom I love, and who astoundingly loves me back! How blessed I am, indeed. Phenomenally blessed.