Thanksgiving
This years thanksgiving and Christmas is unique to say the least. The holiday was with family no doubt, but not the family back home. It was a holiday that I will never been able to experience the same way again, which makes it quit special if you ask me.
On the actual day of thanksgiving
We opened up the morning with worship. All the songs we sang were centered around laying everything down, and thanking the Lord for everything he has given us. Truly realizing nothing we have is ours but the Lords. We wrote in our journals what we are thankful for, and had a time of singing our own song to the lord to praise him for who he is an all powerful…. All mercifulll….all loving…. All consuming….. constant God.
Since we had ministry on the actual day me and my team did a care point fast, which looks like just eating the care point food. A day that normally for us looks like eating until the button on our pants pops off turned in to truly looking at the day, and focusing on what the holiday is even meant for….be thankful…. Cheesy I know, but seriously stripping away the excitement for the turkey forced us to sit back and be thankful for what we have, and the people around us.
We had a super sweet time that night where we all sat in the commons room, and one at a time if we felt lead to complement anyone in the room for any reason we would in front of everyone. This just made me so much appreciative of the people I have been living with for the past three months. Complementing each other in front of everyone helps me see things I did not see any people before. I truly am living with the best group of people with the kindest hearts. This time made me so thankful for them. Community like the one I have right now is so rare.
We closed the night like we began it, with worship!!
Saturday November 30 2019
First I just want to say, we have the best hosts in Swaziland. David and Jenna made thanksgiving over the top special for us. I got to go shopping with them and sam all the way in Manzini just to get the ingredients we needed for our thanksgiving meal. We had each team make two side dishes, and David took on the task of cooking the chicken. We had mashed potatoes, apple sauce, Mac and cheese, stuffing, green bean casserole, deviled eggs, rolls, gravy, punch made out of cranberry juice and sprite, apple crumble, pumpkin pie, chocolate chip cookies, pumpkin cookies, and peanut butter cookies for the gluten free people. We came to a lot of hiccups in making all this food like the oven not working being out of sugar etc, but it all worked out perfectly. So many people stepped in and helped when one thing after the next was going wrong. #perksoflivinginthebestcommunity David and Jenna also saved the day by letting us go over to their house and use their oven last minute, and with cooking the chicken when they could have been spending their Saturday any other way. They are the best. All the food turned out perfectly, and honestly tasted a lot like home every though we made up a lot of the recipes and got creative with the ingredients. It was a nice sliver of home to have a normal American thanksgiving meal. The shepherds were invited to their first thanksgiving ever! We invited Sithulele in a special way by hyping up thanksgiving and talking about it and how special it was to us nonstop, and then we had bought him a watch in South Africa that we were going to give him as a going away gift, but we used it to invite him. We put the watch in an old jam can, and decorated it with watercolored paper saying “happy thanksgiving we love you” Then we put a note inside with the watch that said “be on TIME for our thanksgiving celebration”. Seeing his face when he opened it, and just seeing how thankful and a loss for words him was was so so special. I love that guy. Any way all the shepherds were there, and dolly our cook, and Jerry our bus driver. It was really cool to invite them into our culture that night and fellowship with them. We all wrote thank you cards to our shepherds, and put them at their seat. And of course we went around the table and said what we were thankful for…. A thanksgiving must…. We also drew names from a bowl of the whole squad, so everyone got someone on the squad to write a thank you note to. The guys on our squad have such a big heart. They knew how stressed me and sam were because we were planning everything, and in the beginning everything was going wrong. So they bought us hug in a mug pumpkin spice lattes (best instant coffee ever) , and they got us the book of psalms (a book full of praises and thanksgiving) in Swazi. Of course we ended the night listening to Christmas music, because Christmas starts as soon as thanksgiving ends!!
Christmas!!
Due to the fact the whole squad is split up in Myanmar, we were all pretty bummed about the fact that we were not all going to be together for Christmas. So what did we do??? We celebrated 23 days early!!! Jenna gave us all of her Christmas decorations her tree and everything, and we bought streamer, wrapping paper, and a merry Christmas sign up in Manzini. Someone bought an elf of the shelf, name B, and put in a new place every night. I still have no idea who it was. We made Christmas cookies at David and Jennas jamming out to all the Christmas tunes. That night we walked into a Christmas wonderland!!! The tables were all set up with cookies and icing. We also made some popcorn green, because why not. We have Christmas music on, and we all went to town on the icing and sprinkles. After we ate all the cookies some of us decorated rice cakes hahah. We then had three Christmas movies playing in various places around the base, and we got to choose on which one we wanted to watch. I picked elf of course. It just felt like Christmas so much even though it was a 100 degrees outside. I love how unique and creative holidays on the race are.
