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Christmas Eve


Christmas Eve finds Josh unusually sentimental. I'm the sentimental one usually. But Christmas Eve holds so many memories and traditions. Christmas Eve in the States has involved a Christmas Eve service that we have usually been heavily involved in with the music, Josh's sister's birthday (usually celebrated at Jessi's prime time: midnight, after the Christmas Eve service!), lots of delicious food by Josh's mom, and a sense of family togetherness.

This year is different - so very different! We had to keep reminding ourselves that it's Christmas Eve!

So here is how we celebrated Christmas Eve. Josh took the day off to be home with us, which was so nice, although we kept way too busy with the kids to actually enjoy each others' company!

We had a good old fashion water-play-time-in-bins and rowdy water fight - perhaps a first for our visiting boys, but they figured it out soon enough!

For dinner, we had chapati burritos - again, perhaps not our boys' favorite food since they had never had anything like that before, but I gave them some other food once they had at least tried it. The rest of us loved it (and the dogs enjoyed the boys' leftovers! I guess the dogs are tired of Acoli food too?). I served Fanta which the kids went crazy over. For dessert we had ICE CREAM! It was a very enjoyable meal, even if it wasn't my mom's traditional beef stew, Russian tea, and stollen or Josh's mom's vege pizza, spinach puffs, italian beef, or any other of the delicacies that she is surely making this weekend.

We wrapped stocking presents for "our" five children tonight. Tomorrow, our "plans" (we live in Africa, so you never know what will ACTUALLY happen!) are to attend church in the morning at the church where the Home of Love children go each Sunday. After church, we'll join the rest of our missionary team and two other Home of Love children (older boys) at Home of Love for Christmas dinner. I'm taking a snack to have after church (crackers, avacado, boiled eggs, biscuits, chapati) and our director's wife will run off to heat up dinner and bring it back to us at Home of Love. In the evening, we'll open stockings (the boys have never really received any gifts on Christmas, so they don't really understand what's in store tomorrow! fun!) and we have one game for the family that we'll open. Later in the week we'll have a Rattin family Christmas to do more American type things and have an excuse for a private family day.

It's a different Christmas, but promises to be full of blessings as we celebrate Christ's birth!

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