Getting to sleep

Heh. Getting to sleep on Christmas eve. Always difficult for kids.

(Or is it? I don't remember it being that difficult. I do remember waking up EARLY on Christmas morning, like 5:30 am, and sitting on the top step of the stairs for a long, long time, eventually joined by my brother, and we sat and talked quietly about what we hoped we'd get until our parents woke up)

here are some tips. Not sure how ideal some of them are for really small kids (the candle one, for example).

I think maybe a good one to add is: If you live somewhere where it's snowy, go out and play in the snow Christmas Eve afternoon. Then take a warm bath to warm back up.

For years and years, Christmas eve evening also included church services for us, which seemed to be kind of a good wind-down thing. And yet, there was also the specialness and the differentness of being in church at NIGHT (normal services were on Sunday mornings. I guess some Disciples churches occasionally do evening vespers service, but I don't remember the churches I belonged to ever doing that. Evening services were pretty much Christmas Eve and Maundy Thursday). The church all lit up, the darkness outside, the decorations - it was different and special and wonderful.

And the Christmas Eve services were very nice and very special. The first church I remember, there were some people of Moravian heritage (also, it was further East in the U.S, closer to where the Moravians lived) and they did the traditional "love feast" with cinnamon buns and milky coffee. (I didn't like coffee so I usually passed that up). The church in Illinois does a Las Posadas (a song, sung to the tune of Good King Wenceslas, about Mary and Joseph seeking an inn to stay in - its a Southwestern tradition brought by a pastor who was originally from there). I actually got to be Mary one year. I was really much too old (I was in my 20s, and the real Mary would have been a young teenager). But it was surprising and moving to do so....you walk up (with your Joseph and with the baby doll that stands in for the Infant) to the steps at the front, and there are chairs to sit on, and then they do the Children's Time - and looking at some of those little kids' faces, well, darned if it didn't seem like they thought they were looking at the "real" Mary....I don't know, maybe they just had good imaginations (or maybe I did). But normally excitable and wiggly children seemed quieter and more reverent that night.

And everywhere I've worshiped (that I can remember), we do the candlelighting part of the service, where the ministers/officiants (sometimes two ministers, sometimes a minister and a layperson) take the light from the lighted Christ candle and pass it to the person seated on the aisle of each pew....who then passes it on down the pew, until everyone has a lit candle (small children get penlights). And then they turn off the lights in the church, and everyone sings Silent Night a capella, and usually we hum the last verse and....well, it takes a lot for me to tear up in public but that will do it. It's incredibly beautiful and something I look forward to every year.

Perhaps in churchgoing families, that stopping and going to church on Christmas Eve does help to settle everyone down. I know it helped to stem some of the feelings of acquisitiveness in my family. (Some families also did a thing of opening one gift Christmas Eve, either before or after the service. We never did; I think I preferred doing all the gifts Christmas morning and leaving the night before solely for church)