Christmas

I'm really behind in my blogging, but I here's a beginning of catch-up. This was Christmas number 6 in Thailand and the 4th in a row. Our first Christmas in Thailand we were just excited to be in Thailand and to be so warm on Christmas day. Our second Christmas in Thailand we were preoccupied with being new parents. Our third Christmas nice because my cousin was here, but these last three I have missed home in spite of having very nice times with our friends. This year, in spite of the effort I knew it would cost, I really wanted to have Christmas at home with all the Christmas food and typical Christmas day activities. We started out with monkey bread in the Wolthuis tradition. I made the dough myself and though the dough was very nice to work with it did rise a LOT and the individual bits that were stuck together were more like whole pieces of monkey bread. I'm sure next time I can fix that problem. For Christmas lunch we invited two families. One family is American with four boys. The other family was David's family(David lived with us earlier in the year). We and the other Americans made traditional American Christmas dishes. Our Kiwi friends made Christmas salads. Since Christmas is at the height of summer in New Zealand salads are much more the norm for them than all of the heavy food we Americans eat. None of us being confident to make a turkey we ordered one from a restaurant that caters turkeys at the holidays. It didn't really cost much more and we thought we'd have the confidence of knowing it was done right. When we cut into the turkey the meat was pink and we weren't quite sure what to do. We went and asked a neighbor to come and check it out for us. Julie came over and pronounced our turkey perfectly done but we still weren't confident. We ended up microwaving some of the turkey. We did a survey among our friends later and found out it was fine to have pinkish meat on turkey and none of us got sick. Oh well. Our second problem was that we didn't know how to cut the turkey. I wish I had a better pic of this, but you can see me holding up a piece I had cut. Larin (who was my turkey cutting assistant) is in the background with an expression of total bafflement. We ended up picking the meat off with our hands. It didn't look very nice but no one cared. We had a lovely dinner and the kids all enjoyed playing together. We had three teenagers so we were able to play some big group games. In spite of not having family there, I would say that this Christmas felt the most homelike of any Christmas we've ever had here. Just the enjoyment of being together at home the whole day made it feel Christmas-y.
However, the best part of the day was talking to our families on Skype. I really wish we'd been able to do it before this year because it was wonderful.

Last, we continued in our Christmas tradition of celebrating with the kids of BBF. We weren't able to do it on Christmas day as this year Christmas was on a school day, but we did have a party on the week-end and were able to bring lots of friends with us. We're sorry that we'll have to break this tradition next year. Here's a pic of them singing in front of a stage they made for the occasion out of bamboo. A celebration isn't fun without being able to sing on a stage:)