Kucios

The Christmas eve meal with meatless and dairyless dishes is important to Lithuanians. This years was a little scaled down from my go all out version last year, but we mostly kept to acceptable tradition with the foods,keeping in mind what the boys may eat.

Neither last night or today proved to be meals they were in the mood to eat. Too much excitement or who knows.

We will be having Christmas gifts over a few days. And we started after the Kucios meal. Thought we would continue with a few in the morning and then other family gifts sent to us after their naps today. Way too ambitious. But that is OK, we are adjusting to where we are at.

We have lots of good video and eventually we may post the you Tube links for some and some of the pictures. The excitement was quite something. I had been trying to explain to them that we are having celebrations of Kucios and Christmas to celebrate Jesus Birthday and because God gave his Son to us as a gift we give gifts. Seemed not to register.

How could it. They never experienced anything like this in a family before. I think Erik heard me but he just did not quite believe it about getting gifts to open until it got close to the time.

Lithuanian tradition requires that Children do something to get their gifts- poem, song, some talent. So we sang the songs they needed to sing in the Church service for today in Silute. And then went to their room to wait for the gifts to appear at the tree. Then Erik believed it. He started bouncing off the walls and his brother copied him.

But they could not have imagined that they would get multiple multiple gifts to open. (Thanks in part to gifts along the way given through some others.- we opted to keep a few of the gifts from the LCC shower for Christmas... and some of the others in the large box of gifts we got lately were wrapped and were conveniently kept till Christmas)

Actually they were to get a few more gifts from us today that they will share, but we held off. David Augenijus was up periodically through the night which interrupted most of our sleep. And they were wound up beyond hope of sleeping till way past their usual time. We slept a little later, had breakfast, they played with their new toys and we headed to Silute for the service.

There were more than 50 people there- as always Christmas brings out more people. But this time it was more new people and some with potential to attend in the future. And the boys sang and did motions nicely with Gregg's help together with the children up front. (It helped that they new they were getting gifts at the end- They'll do most things for candy or something they really want to eat.)

We had a Christmas meal after nap time. Mostly for Gregg and my benefit as it turns out. And they are still having a good time with the things they got last night so we will wait to get them wound up with more gifts till tomorrow.