Quotables: The A'bent Edition

It's now a three-year old tradition, the reading of the Advent Book. For every day of advent, the book provides a new "door" to open, and behind the door, words that propel the Christmas story. So it seems a certain four year old girl in our family latched on to "reading a'bent" this year. I don't know that it was her spiritual curiosity at work so much as it was an early display of mild OCD, but let's settle somewhere in the middle.

Anyway. She essentially memorized the book. No longer was the argument about whose turn it was to open the next door. It was about who got to "read" next. When it wasn't trying my patience (C'mon kids! I need you in bed sometime before 2011!), it melted my heart a time or twenty to hear the story told by the sweet voices of my six and four year old.

Two paragraphs later, and I'm still in the back story? What can I say? I have a gift for dragging a cute story on forever.

So the fact that my daughter had the Christmas story essentially memorized made for some interesting imaginative play. Here is just a sampling of some of the lines I heard her assigning to her dolls.

Dani to Raggedy Ann: Your name was Baggedy Ann, but on de eightd day, I named you Jesus, da name da angel gabe to you bepore you were born.

Raggedy Ann: C'mon, Mary! We hab to go to Egypt cuz King Herod is makin' bad choices!
Sleeping Beauty: I comin', but I hab to pind Jesus pirst. Hurry! Help me pind him!
(It just goes to show you should never trust a Disney Princess with the Christ child. One minute he's safe and sound in the manger. Then the next thing you know, Sleeping Beauty gets put under a spell of some sort and Jesus is nowhere to be found.)

And now, I leave you with an excerpt from Christmas Eve.


Translation: The Holy One to be born to you will be God's son. Even your cousin Elizabeth will have a child in her old age. Nothing is impossible with God. "I am the Lord's servant", Mary answered. "May everything you have said come true." Then the angel left her.