The one that was GOING to be called "Christmas: the Musical"

This blog post is primarily an admission of failure. For the last days of December and a large part of January I had every intention of writing a post entitled, "Christmas: the Musical" and it was going to include all sorts of cute tidbits about my very song-and-dance filled holiday season. It was to start with the paragraph: "Have you ever had that dream where you are on stage, facing a large audience, and you realize that very soon you will be expected to recite the lines of a script that you don't remember having rehearsed? Maybe sing a solo? That dream where everyone else is adequately prepared, and they seem to expect the same of you, but for the life of you you can't remember ever being through this before? Why am I even asking this? Of course you have! And that's why it shouldn't be too difficult for me to convey to you the events of Christmas Day. I think I'll back up a moment."

From there I was going to regale you with tales of a 24-hour church choir rehearsal, a concert planned seemingly by chance for Christmas Day, technical rehearsals held in a bedroom inside of a bank, choreography performed with a group of pre-teen girls donning matching dresses, evenings filled with cramming French and Ngumbaye song lyrics into my head by lamplight... all of this leading up to 4:00 on Christmas Day when I came out on stage with my worship group, "Les Semeurs," nervous as if it were a final exam to evaluate how much I had retained after all the whirlwind weeks of cramming. And the first thing that happened was we started singing a song I had NEVER heard before. And of course I was standing at my own microphone and of course multiple people were standing at the foot of the stage filming me exclusively. After illustrating that, I might have included some positive moments from the concert to redeem myself, and probably some thoughtful "meaning of Christmas" conclusions to tie it all together.

That was what I was GOING to write, but I don't know. Maybe it was too painful to relive for you (probably not, because Christmas was actually quite a good time!) or maybe I was just too busy having new experiences to spend too much time dwelling on old 2014. In fact, while I was adamantly not finishing my blog post, I was already throwing myself into documenting 2015. My New Years resolution was to, "for each day of January, note an observation, thought, or experience that might otherwise go unrecorded." There are so many little quotidian happenings that, for me at least, do a better job of capturing the special parts of my Chaddian life than the big Headlines. For that reason, in the following post I present you with some selected January snapshots. If you are members of my family or close friends, which you probably are, you have already received these in weekly installments, but you'll find a couple February snapshots at the bottom because this habit of daily journaling has been hard to break.