While most of us are with our families, enjoying party after party, gift exchanges, exorbitant amounts of food and singing songs like “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”, Christmas in foster care can be starkly different.  While our foster parents do an excellent job of making their foster children a part of their family, and loving them like their own, for our birth parents, it can be a very painful time.  For some, it is the first Christmas without their children. To some, it’s just another day. No presents are exchanged, and no special meal is cooked.                                                                                                                                       Over the past couple years, we’ve started giving some sort of Christmas gift to our birth parents, who are actively involved in their children’s lives through visitation at our agency. We decided to do something a little bit different this year for our parents. I’ve recently taken an interest in photography and purchased had just purchased my first DSLR camera this year, so we decided back in November to start taking really nice pictures of these precious kids and doing 8 x 10 prints for these parents. With the help of our awesome church partner, Chapel Hill and some community members in  Gig Harbor, who had contacted us asking how they could help, we were provided with 35 nice frames for these prints. I wish I could share with you these pictures, however,  we have to keep from posting any pictures of specific foster kids on the web.  Just know that they turned out so incredibly well. Giving these gifts to our parents went over beautifully. Many parents shed tears of gratefulness as they unwrapped these pictures, and told us where they would hang them in their home, or who they couldn’t wait to show. I, myself, was convicted heavily as to what I take for granted during this time of year. Even something like photographs, which are an abundant commodity to most Americans in our age of digital photography, email and facebook, can be the most treasured  and appreciated gift, in their simplest form.  - Sarah