Who Needs A White Christmas?

I'm leaving London at around 2:00 pm today and I'm driving down to Florida with my dad and my brother (collectively known as "the David Grants"). The original plan was to bring the three South Korean boys down to meet their parents in Florida but as I learned late last night, that plan was cancelled several weeks ago. In any case, we three men will play a lot of cards with my dad's parents, go to many buffets and play much golf. It's like early retirement!

As for this past week, I just finished a whirlwind schedule. Monday night, we had our final Christmas choir/drama presentation at church. I now have a DVD recording of the final presentation, which went perfectly. For the record, I remembered the words for my solo five out of six nights. Apparently there's a DVD of the second presentation when I messed up my lyrics and I plan to get a copy of that in January, if only for the sake of the ongoing joke.

On Tuesday evening, I spent four hours with Ariel Terry recording various worship songs. 'Twas excellent. We recorded the first version of one worship song that I wrote and Ariel layed down guitar and piano tracks for two more songs that I had started. We also did a set of four familiar worship songs. The next day, I edited five of the tracks for length and spit 'em all out to a CD. I created a nice little CD label and I prepared numerous copies for my various extended family members. (Anyone that is interested can ask me for a free copy and I'll get one to you in January.)

On Wednesday, my family "officially" celebrated Christmas with a full turkey dinner and the opening of presents. Since my and my sister will be at my mom's parents during Christmas while we're in Florida, we had to get everything in early. I managed to get the first copy of my worship CD done about fifteen minutes before I stuck it in the CD player for my mom as her Christmas gift. Talk about a race to the finish!

As usual, my family had a nice set of new DVDs (TV seasons and movies) by the time we were done. La piece de resistance was the boxed set of Calvin & Hobbes that I received from my family. It has immediately become the centrepiece of my entire comic collection, and that's saying a lot.

Following our family Christmas on Wednesday, I then finished the night off with not just one but two parties. I had a party with my cell group and then I hit the second half of the wrap party for my Christmas choir. Busy, busy. On Thursday afternoon, I capped off my week by picking up various Terry kids from various places and having dinner with them at their house. (Thanks for the gifts, everyone!) I had to drop up another pile of presents for them, which is the main reason I made that trip. Richard even showed up later on so he, Joel and I got the chance to catch up on things.

Even with all of this hustle and bustle, I still had an opportunity to donate to Take It Or Leave It. I wrote about this before and I'll say it again, they do amazing work. In this case, the people involved in that program had heard about a single mother with one child under a year old and another on the way. They were delivering something to this woman's house this past week and it was almost entirely bare.

On Wednesday night at the wrap party for the choir, they spoke to a few people privately and now they'll be buying this woman various major necessities and they'll deliver it just in time for Christmas. Since they give 100% of their donations (either financial or material) to people that need it, I love working with them. I encourage you all to check the main website and to donate something that is listed there. Many thanks.