A Beautiful Life: Tropical Christmas

The "holidays" have less busy-ness here than back home, but we still enjoy some good traditions!

Our Annual Christmas Supper with Emanier, Madam Ino and her granddaughter Mayu. Menu: Chicken Linguini, Banana Bread, Smoothies, Green Beans, and Brownies with Chocolate Chunks.

My birthday was the first day of Orrin's 3 week school Christmas break. Happy Birthday to me! :-P We made pizza in the cast iron skillet, and ate outside in our patio, with bug repellent essential oil diffusing out of my new birthday gift :) On Saturday, we were planning to go to Cayes sans kids, but felt kind of under the weather. We still went as we were looking forward to eating out, and I really needed groceries (think 5 weeks since last town trip). We stopped by the gardens to look around, saw some damage it received from the hurricane, but were too tired to stay around. We had a good time in town but were pretty tuckered out.

The "new" bridge to get to the gardens. Eeek!

That weekend, we had two school Christmas Programs - English and Creole. The Geckos program was Saturday night, and featured handbells, singing, and recitation of Bible verses. Orrin has been practicing Isaiah 9:6 "...and His name shall be called, Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace." He was graciously included in the program as an honorary student and sort of mumbled through his verse in front of all those people. When he got home, he did it just fine for the camera ;)

His Gai Foyer school program was Sunday afternoon and in typical Haitian style - late, loud and long. It was to start at 2, but someone came and said it was going to start at 1. So around 1, Orrin and I headed up. David was feeling icky still, and stayed home with Cassia who was taking a nap. I figured we wouldn't start on time anyway, and was correct. I think we started about 2:30. David slipped in just as it started. Orrin was sitting by the school students, and I couldn't believe that he sat with them even before things started - for about 45 minutes! He must be learning how to sit still in school! There was lots of singing, dancing, and recitation. The whole group sang some songs together, but I don't think Orrin knew he was supposed to sing along since they stayed in their benches. Oh well, it was still good to be involved, fun to see it, and good to make some parent/child connections. Orrin got his report card and copies of his workbook pages from the past few months. He got good marks and it looks like he's understanding what they're wanting him to do in the workbooks - better than when I went with him the first time!

After two programs in one weekend......

We had a Sunday afternoon of Christmas caroling in Cayes. We went to a nursing home, and then Clinic Lumiere to sing. Then enjoyed having a supper together as a group.

The Wednesday evening before Christmas we did caroling at the Hospital instead of church. We have some Creole songbooks with music, and used them to sing lots of songs in Creole, which was nice as we could get some participation from the crowd.

One morning, we went up to Joan's to help her make food for some family coming to visit them for Christmas. Her kids played/occupied my kids, and I totally loved the fire she had going in the "fireplace."

In keeping with the fake stuff we have to do, here is a "snowball" fight we had one day this "winter."

Orrin's Bible activity over the past few weeks have centered around Jesus' birth. We did lots of activities and made a Nativity scene. The tree is Haitian-made from pop bottles, and we made the lights ourselves to put on it.

We had some special foods at Christmas too. Wing Fest is a tradition back home with David's family that we miss on the 23rd. We miss the food, the togetherness, the gathering in the shed. This year, I had Madam Ino fry up chicken and we put hot wing sauce on it so we could at least have the taste of wings on Wing Fest day.

One morning, we made green eggs....it was kind of a whim from reading Green Eggs and Ham, but it was fun and Christmas-y with the pan of green scrambled eggs. Then some kids came and sold us some turkey eggs, and so we fried them up one morning. Yum, yum!! And last but not least, we found some oranges in town, so we got a special Christmas splurge....a bag of oranges for about $10. And we had some Christmas popcorn sent to us....yum, yum!

Christmas Eve, we relaxed around home, and had our meal and gift exchange.

On Christmas Day, we had Haitian church in the morning, then English church in the afternoon, followed by a baseball game. Then supper together at Kurt and Joan's, a fire and s'mores.

I left a while after supper to go to church where my singing group was hosting a Christmas program - a bummer not to be able to be in two places at once, but I guess I got in on a little of each.