Eve & Christmas Day 2007

This year Christmas eve falls on a Monday and I am working unlike many others who took a day off from work. My company department had a small Christmas lunch together and gift exchange party. The lunch was being organized in a pot-luck style. There were pastas, fried rice, cheese cakes, roast chicken, jellies, muffins, soft drinks, packet drinks and some junk food. Each of us contributed our share. Me and another colleague bought those muffins. Overall, the food tasted good and except for the muffins, roast chicken, drinks and junk food, the rest of it was home made! After our lunch we had the gift exchange session. Each of us has provided our gift to the organizer and it were being numbered. Coincidentally the gift that I provided was being given the number 7 which is my favorite number. To determine who gets which gift, we all each get to choose a number and that's the gift number we get. Want to know what I got from my company gift exchange? Stay tune, I will post on it later.

Last week there was a public holiday on Thursday and I took annual leave on Friday, so I had 4 days off from work. And my work on Christmas eve after the short holiday break was surprisingly busy. Replying work e-mails had taken a least half of my day. And my company allowed us to leave early at 4pm. So, I left around 4.15pm and it was raining very heavily at that time. More like a thunder storm. Well, as long as I could remember, it always rains on Christmas eve. I could remember the Christmas eve weather so clearly because I used to join my former church youth group for caroling on the night of Christmas eve. But I am not doing that since I left the church and join another church now. This year I had a nice quiet Christmas eve dinner with my mom.

This is the Christmas tree at home that I had mentioned setting it up alone on my earlier post. Been using the same Christmas tree for the past three years now. I am thinking of changing the decorations next year. Maybe make a theme for it like White Christmas as such. Hmm... buying those Christmas tree decorations doesn't come cheap. On second thoughts, maybe I would put off the idea for another year depending on my next year's budget. Oh! And I had got all the Christmas presents prepared on time amid my last minute shopping this year. Some of the presents are now below the Christmas tree and some I had given out to people. The big teddy bear and those soft toys are not part of the Christmas presents though. Hehehe....

I woked up at 8am on Christmas morning today to get ready for church. Aldrin came pick me up at 8.30am and we reach church just slightly over 9am. This year the church started the Baptism service first before the Christmas service began at 9.30am. There were around 50-60 people got baptised today. All went well and ended well. Christmas service ended at 11am.

After half a day gone by on Christmas day, I was being reminded of this one very important thing. What is the true meaning of Christmas? It's not all those presents we give or receive or the Christmas tree we had that makes it a day to be called Christmas day. Christmas is not Christmas without Jesus Christ who were born on 25th December to bring us hope, peace, love and salvation. He is the greatest gift ever.