Christmas Eve - Keller (Dallas) Texas Our journey down to Texas was pretty uneventful. The most exciting part was our drive to the airport from Oakville to Toronto. The taxi driver arrived in a people mover (van) designed to accommodate someone in a wheelchair. This was just as well as the floor space in the van was filled with 13 items of luggage. The bench seat at the back took the 4 of us and Mum sat in the passenger seat. There was no room to put anything in the trunk as this was filled with his Christmas presents. Needless to say the van was fully loaded. We didn't/couldn't put on seat belts and the our driver drove like a man possessed. In classic Canadian style only 6 and half inches behind the man in front on him. Quite interesting. 

My brother Anthony and his wife Carolyn met us with 2 cars. This was a relief as we could not have got into 1. We are staying in a long term hotel / apartment type of thing. This is a large room with a kitchenette (with cooker, fridge, microwave etc). It has one double bed and one pull out sofa and all the other hotel type furniture. The cost is $41.88 per night (weekly rate) but goes down if you stay longer. There are people here who have been here for months and months. Well at that price you would wouldn't you? This type of accommodation is very popular in the US where there are large numbers of people who get posted to different places for months at a time. They were originally intended for business type customers (there are few tourists like us who would stay around here for longer than a day) but have become places for the displaced as well. Just perfect for us then. 

 On Christmas Eve we went to a huge church for their candlelight carol service. This was quite amazing resembling more of a West End musical than a church production. Julie and I counted nearly 2,000 seats inside and they were bringing in extra chairs and many were standing around the edges as well. I counted 7 flat panel PC monitors and 2 massive plasma displays in the foyer alone. The mind boggling thing is this was a regular sized church and there is one like this seemingly on every street corner (albeit that the steet corners are a quarter of a mile apart). There were 50 people on stage at any one time. The band included 7 strings, 5 wind instruments and a choir of at least 20. The "worship leader" (a title I use very loosely in this context) displayed his teams' skills and dexterity with a performance that Liberace might have presented in his Las Vegas hey day. Pure spectacle. When we were finally permitted to join his team (and surely detract from the level of performance he had so far achieved) by singing along, he was leading us with such panache and theatre that just for a moment I wondered if he might have been encouraging us to worship him rather than our Lord. I'm sure that this was just my Britishness (our desire to keep everything to the level of understatement) blinding me but it seemed like it to me. We arrived early as we were told (quite rightly) that we wouldn't get a seat if we didn't. We left with the crowd but being as we have arrived early we were at the rear of the exiting hoard. But what we couldn't fathom was that by the time we had reached the entrance door 2,000 plus people had evaporated into thin air. The car park was empty bar 5 cars. There was certainly no hospitality, fellowship or coffee - pooh! Nope sireeeee, the show was over, time to go home.