HOLLY JOLLY HO HO HO MAS !!! Merry Christmas everyone! I cant believe it is Christmas and I am in Ethiopia (like what the what). This season is really hard really but God is so good and there is so much good in this. I just wanted to let you into what my Christmas in the middle of now where looks like.
First of all we live in the middle of no where. Literally miles and miles os fields around us. We live in a small village with some random side shops and a big animal market. So not many resources close by. But that did not stop us. My team appointed ourselves as the Christmas committee or Santa’s elves. We went really hard. Like really hard.
We brought the squad the 12 Days of Christmas. Here’s a quick little summary of each of the days.
Friday 14. “Open Ceremonies”, we sang our 12 day of Christmas song and had a very dramatic hanging of a 4in wreath.
Saturday 15. Snowflakes of Affirmation, we made snow flakes for everyone and wrote a couple words of affirmation. We really did have a white Christmas.
Sunday 16. Santas Elves covered our family room and dinning room in decorations and Christmas cheer.
Monday 17. Ugly Christmas sweater competition that kind of turned into a full on Christmas costume party. We had a lot of participation, so big success.
Tuesday 18. Carol of the bells performance, this day was a true sacrifice of pride (we lip synch and danced around awkwardly like ballerinas).
Wednesday 19.We had a Christmas riff off. We had a word and had to sing a song that had that word in it. (this was a big success too, people went really hard).
Thursday 20. Decorate the tree (we made a tree out of branches from other trees and it is really good).
Friday 21.We hung the stockings (socks). Everyone filled the socks with fun notes.
Sat 22. We had a movie night with all the kids and watched Elf.
Sunday 23. We made bracelets for the kids that live with us for Christmas.
Monday 24. We had a musical nativity. I was the star.
Tuesday 25. We were Santa himself. In the middle of the night we made chocolate chip cookies, no bake cookies, apple pie filling and peppermint bark. Every person woke up to a plate full of cookies and stocking.
Some other fun Christmas activities that we had was our Christmas Eve dinner we made a really really long table and the table committee did a good job with the table setting. We all dressed up and took cute pictures. We had a really sweet time at dinner. Then we had your classic Christmas Eve candle light service. We had a reading of the Christmas story, some classic carols and candles with silent night.
One of my favorite parts was going to our very strange market and trying to find gifts for all my teammates. They were all very weird but it was so fun to give these strangely sentimental gifts.
Being away from home for Christmas is really hard and especially not having access to wifi to talk to my family. But this whole season had been really special because I get to learn what it means to be home with Jesus. It also has been really fun to bless the squad with all these Christmas activates to make this season away from our families a little easier.
