Merry Christmas! (church & lights)

Merry Christmas, Sweet Baby,

I am back from Midnight Mass at Our Lady Of Lourdes, my Mom's church just a block up from my apartment. I will post first, then come back and write.  :)

I am back. The service at OLL was very beautiful and traditional. The Catholic Mass is very participatory, with congregation responses following certain recitations, and it is also ceremonial and ritualistic. Prayers are said in a distinct order, followed immediately by music. It's all very powerful, especially with a packed church. I am always in the overflow section of the crowd, standing in the narthex (lobby) area. The Mass was about 80 minutes, with lots of singing.

Earlier in the evening I also went to the Christmas Eve service at Reseda Methodist. We had a pretty full church, too, more than usual and of course you get that on major holidays like Christmas Eve or Easter. This service was unique because it was bi-lingual. They had a band singing in Spanish and then the congregation would alternate with them in English. It was certainly different, but nice. All of us choir members were in the audience. It was a short service, only 45 minutes, so afterward we headed over to Candy Cane Lane, which is a Christmastime name for several streets in the neighboring town of Woodland Hills. Candy Cane Lane started out in the 1940s or 50s as just one street, now it's several, and it's in an upper-middle class neighborhood. People on those streets have a decades old tradition at Christmas of lighting their homes to the hilt, and it's really something to see. I've been going for years, but this year - wow. The lights and decorations were beautiful as always, but I have never before seen such a line of cars to get in.

You'd have thought it was a U2 concert at a stadium or the World Series. The traffic began to back up about a mile from Candy Cane Lane, and then it came to a stop not much further. From that point it moved at a crawl, and it took us (me, Pearl, her daughter and The Kobedog) about 45 minutes just to reach the streets with the lights from that point. One of the all time traffic jams, but it was worth it because the lights were beautiful and it was nice to see so many people enjoying them. Even the Channel 7 ABC News was there.

So that was my night, a good one with a lot of Christmas Spirit.

I hope your day was good, and that you had a nice Christmas Eve with family and maybe friends too.

I saw your Taya Iv post this morning, and it was absolutely perfect! It summed up everything that this year has been about, and the part about climbing a mountain was right on the money too.  :)

So, now I'll be heading back to NORAD in Colorado Springs. We're gonna be tracking Santa for the rest of the night, and it'll be a pretty busy one, but I imagine he'll be all done by morning, so I should be back home and awake by the usual time, 10am or so.

In the meantime, Sweet Dreams! And Merry Christmas too........

I Love You.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)