Christmas

This was my first Christmas away from home and I totally expected the worst: miserable homesickness, lame celebrations, loneliness, and maybe some food poisoning thrown in for good measure. I'm now here to say that it was far better than I asked or expected. But for your perusal, here's a bit of what Christmas looked like here:

Christmas baking: as a team, we alternated which house with an oven to use for baking each day. I'll have you know that we successfully navigated many substitutions or alterations in the recipes to fit with the food items available here. One example would be peanut cookies-- we started by roasting and peeling the paper off several cups of peanuts! Jess even made lasagna, but she had to start by making ricotta cheese and lasagna noodles. Despite the challenges, we produced a lot of amazing food!

Lessons in carols: on Christmas Eve we got together and sang carols, interspersed with Scripture readings. It was a beautiful time of remembering the reason for celebration this season. And, true to form, the power went out just as we started. No candlelight service though, seeing as we had five kids age five and under running around.

Christmas morning: I stayed over with some friends, and we baked cinnamon rolls for the morning. Family tradition lives on!  The cinnamon rolls were delicious, despite the fact that I decided not to make cream cheese for cream cheese frosting.

Cinnamon rolls!

In the afternoon, we got together at Tom and Megan's house for food, gift exchange, games, and a Christmas movie. We also got the kids to act out the Christmas story, which was the cause of much laughter and picture taking.

The angel (atop dad) gives good news to Joseph

Shepherds being contained while the staff and sheep are neglected

Shepherds visit the mother and baby

Finally, at 10:30 in the evening we called it a day, caught a taxi back to the airport town, and settled down for a good rest. 

Now it's the day after Christmas and I'm making a game plan for the week: setting goals for language learning, planning house improvements and cleaning projects, and catching up on things neglected during the Christmas rush.

Praise: for a wonderful Christmas! I thank the Father so much for the people He brought around me here, and for the opportunity to catch up with my family at home through video chat. Also, we now have covers for the furniture that is falling apart, and shelves in the kitchen!

Pray: our plumbing has still not been fixed. It's been 2.5 weeks now, and I'm very ready to be able to shower and use the toilet in our house. Also, because of the plumbing issues, we still don't have a solution for getting water into our upper cistern.