Be BRAVE and TRUE

Tonight my entire plan is to finish drinking this snowdrift vanilla porter and fill more fandom_stocking prompts with tiny fics.   I'm all cuddled up with my wife and my electric heating pad.  It's a good Christmas Eve.

When I was a kid, Christmas Eve was a whole fucking thing.  I was an acolyte at my church, and Christmas Eve was THE big deal service.  We had a rehearsal.  Sometimes I'd work multiple services because our church did Christmas Eve four times back to back: 5:00, 7:30, 9:00 and midnight.

It was, at its heart, just a bunch of awkward teenagers in robes with candles, but we took it pretty seriously.  We didn't burn the sanctuary down, and we tried very hard not to drip wax on the pews.  One time I tripped halfway up a flight of stairs because my robe didn't fit and I was trying to get to the balcony ASAP to get everyone's candles lit before they started singing Silent Night, but other than that I did a good job.

Afterward the service we'd all gather in one of the church classrooms.  It was connected to a tiny kitchen where the church kept communion bread and Welch's grape juice handy.  Someone would bang out O Holy Night on the poorly-tuned piano in the corner, and the couple of acolytes with decent vocal range would sing along.

I didn't like a lot of the church stuff in my childhood, but I liked that.