Since our previous pastor (who had led the church for eighteen years) took a college faculty position down south, we are a fair amount of the way through a pastoral search, but our interim is a pastor whom our church has known for a long time (he was kind of our main guest-sermon-giver over the years). He is more than qualified as our interim, so it’s been a smooth transition so far.
I've also recently become temporary co-leader of the church worship team, in an unexpected-ish development. Our former worship leader, a military guy, is off doing a military internship and then probably retiring. Another vocalist and I are jointly spearheading the worship team's once-a-month leads until...well, no one has said, but I suspect it's at least until the new pastor comes in, or maybe until someone else wants to run the team. Interim Pastor is arranging other worship leaders for the other weeks, since even under our previous worship leader, we'd only been singing twice a month anyway. So far it's...fine? I haven't done a lot of it yet.
Work felt mostly normal this year, and I’m okay with that.
This being our first Christmas at home, today we made Christmas finger Jell-O a la Pioneer Woman (my verdict: the recipe made waaaayyy too much, and it tastes fine, but not good enough to justify that amount) and went to the Christmas Eve service at church (which we don't often get to do). Then we waited for basically an hour to pick up our Chinese food from a place fairly near our condo, but the girls were very good while waiting (their getting to watch some kind of baking show on the restaurant's TV helped). The food was all right, reasonably worth the wait, even if not the Chinese of my dreams. I tried a crab rangoon from one of the girls and decided that it actually benefited from not having a very perceptible amount of crab in it. Their scallion pancakes are one thumb up (tasted good; nice and crispy; really could use more scallion). Their beef fried rice was a pleasant surprise, in that we figured it would probably be fine, but instead it was quite good. Their sesame chicken, alas, I won't get again: too sweet.
Making tomorrow: cranberry-glazed ham, Aunt Peggy's potatoes, rolls of some type, green beans. Eric's mom is bringing an apple pie for dessert. Yes to all of that.
The girls are good. They are the merriest part of Christmas, and it's time for me to see if I should help Eric wrap their presents.
Merry Christmas. Love to all.