Some Christmas Stories

Christmas is usually a time to gather with family and friends. It is rich in old traditions or starting new ones. A few of the employees at GBA shared what they did over Christmas break.

Lea Murray

In the Philippines we celebrate Christmas Season starting in September, we start decorating our tree and wrapping our Christmas gifts as early as September. However, the majority of the Filipinos here in the U.S.A. have a busy lifestyle so we celebrate it on December only, but we have parties almost every weekend. Yes we do like parties!! But we do not forget the reason of this season; it’s the birth of Jesus Christ. Nine days before Christmas we celebrate Simbang Gabi (Christmas Novena) and eat dinner after the mass. On Christmas Eve, each family prepare a dinner Feast, we call it Noche Buena, we open our Christmas presents at 12:00 a.m. and go to Church on Christmas day before we eat lunch.

I have two kinds of Christmas Trees at home; we have the American Christmas Tree and the Filipino Christmas Tree. The Filipino Christmas Tree is in the Kitchen since we always assemble in the kitchen whenever we have get-togethers.

Doug Carpenter

This was an extra special Christmas around the Carpenter household. Not only was it the first official Christmas of the Carpenter household (my wife and I just got married on November 21st of this year), but December 23rd also it marked the 10th birthday of our yorkie, Cappy. So on Christmas Day, my parents joined us at our house for a late breakfast and we unwrapped all of our presents. As you can see in the picture, Cappy couldn’t wait to put on his new stylish outfit and pose for the camera. Hope everyone else had a wonderful Christmas as well!

Adam Stodola
My mom came down from Nebraska to spend the first Christmas in the new house and there was the requisite amount of eating, drinking, and being Merry.  We took advantage of the warm weather by smoking a brisket on Christmas Eve and then taking it easy the rest of the weekend. Just how I like it…  laid back and stress free… unless of course you consider the beating I took in the card games. That was not stress free. 

All in all, it was a good Christmas… and I hope it was the same for everyone else.

Nathan Johnson
Christmas at the Johnsons was a blast!

We got the party started with baking and decorating cookies for Santa. After we recovered from the sprinkle induced coma, it was over the river and through the woods for dinner and presents at our Great-grandparents house, where we got to have all sorts of fun with our favorite cousins.

With great anticipation and just a couple tears we said goodbye to everyone and headed home where we finally got to sleep, anxious to see what Santa had in store for us.

Christmas morning just couldn’t get here soon enough.

Once it was finally time to open presents the wrapping paper couldn’t come off fast enough. We had so much fun opening all the fun toys and even the clothes, that we decided it would be a good time to head to Grandma and Grandpa Johnson’s for even more presents and a little brunch too.

Since there is no such thing as too much of a good thing, we loaded up and headed to Granny and Poppy Cano’s for a little dinner and just a few more presents.

After such an awesome day, the only way to top it off was cheering our Wildcats onto a big win and tournament championship in Hawaii. Only Daddy made it all the way through the game, but he said it was a great end to an even better weekend.