We actually had a
great Christmas this year! We were fairly intentional about our celebrations,
having brought out some of our decorations (supplemented by an excellent
Christmas care package from Cat's family - thanks again!), a small Christmas
tree, Theo's presents and a fair amount of culinary Christmas essentials such
as mincemeat, a Christmas pudding and a Christmas cake back from England in October. We also made sure to spend time with some of our ex-pat friends over
the break doing Christmassy things together like making a gingerbread house,
eating mince pies and watching various films that mean Christmas to all of us
(for the Americans this included "It's a wonderful life" and
"Elf", for us it was "Mary Poppins" - not set at Christmas
but always on TV around this time! ). We also started a family tradition of
having an advent wreath (made by the simple method of sticking candles in our
door wreath that would make no sense to our neighbours if we did put it on the
door!). Every Sunday during Advent we lit a candle, sang a new verse of the song we picked and read some passages from the Bible according to what
each candle represented (God's people waiting for Jesus' return; the prophets;
John the Baptist; Mary and then the centre Christ candle on Christmas Day)
Christmas Day was
also lovely! It was actually the first time we had woken up in our own house on
Christmas morning since we got married and we really enjoyed opening our
stockings and presents with the three of us together. We had the morning as a family and then had
our good friends Tim, Jeana and Micaiah over for a traditional Christmas dinner
- they had managed to get hold of two ducks for us via their neighbours' friend
as well as making us some sausagemeat with their meat grinder, so we had roast
duck, sausagemeat stuffing, roast potatoes and roasted vegetables - our little oven was bursting at the seams! We also introduced them to the traditions of
Christmas crackers, sung grace and mulled 'wine' (juice) as well as the tradition of
Christmas dinner not actually being quite ready until mid-afternoon (like I
said, the oven was ridiculously full and the ducks took FOREVER). As far as I know, a good time was had by all!
Thanks again to everyone who sent us Christmas supplies, presents and cards -
they all helped make our first Christmas in Mpanda a really special time.
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