Durham Christmas festivities

We had a number of fun Christmas-y events around Durham in December. One of my favorites was when the little dancing girls at church danced to "Go Tell It On the Mountain" in the services at church. Claire practiced so diligently and did such a great job! (Lily and Brynnie practiced with her, but they aren't old enough to dance with the group yet.)

A long-time favorite Christmas-time event for Brad and me is to see The Messiah performed in Duke chapel. It's just magical. Because of continued pandemic procedures, they truncated the performance down to just over an hour (as opposed to the full three hours), so that was a little disappointing, but I was glad we got to go for the first time in several years (3, maybe?).

I dearly love the Duke chapel. It's so beautiful.

We didn't manage to get a picture inside (which is a shame), but I did remember to get *A* picture.

Whenever we can, we like to invite some of our best grown-up girl friends over to watch Christmas movies in our jammies. We snagged Kendall for a viewing of How the Grinch Stole Christmas:

And Jill and Maggie joined us for A Charlie Brown Christmas:

Our church partners with a local ministry, Reality Ministries, and every year, Reality hosts a living nativity evening. We've never been able to attend before, but we were finally able to and had a really fun evening! Although, I was pretty busy wrangling children and trying to prevent them from setting anything on fire with their candles, so I didn't get too many pictures.

The next week, we had an outdoor Carol Sing at church (which also involved wrangling children + keeping an eye on candles):

Because we are usually not at our own home for Christmas, we started a tradition years ago of having a "family Christmas eve" and "family Christmas morning" before we begin our Christmas travels. For 2021, we had already decided that we would actually travel with our family gifts and open them at Gran's and Grandpa's, but we wanted to keep our "family Christmas eve" tradition in place, anyway.

We eat "fancy food" (think: tailgating foods, party foods) on our Christmas china.

And we choose a Christmas movie to watch. This year was The Grinch.

We had so many opportunities to celebrate Christmas around Durham and with friends (including events I didn't get pictures of) and absolutely loved every last minute of it!