The Christmas season got under way for us on December 6. On this day, Selah's class (KG2) along with the KG1 class, presented a Nativity play. It was about a Russian family coming to understand the true meaning of Christmas.
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| The Nativity Presentation. |
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| Selah and her dear friend, Sephora. |
The next week, on December 12, grades 1-6 along with the middle school and high school choirs presented a Christmas program. It was quite fitting that the high school choir began the night singing, "Africa" by Toto. Each class then sang a few songs. Sofia's class sang "I Heard the Bells" and a rhythmic African Christmas song. The evening came to a close with the middle school and high school choirs surrounding the audience and singing an acapella version of "Silent Night Around the World". It was just beautiful.
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| The setting for the Christmas program. The angel's wings were made from palm branches. |
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| Sofia and her grade 3 class. |
The girls' school Christmas break is December 18 - January 7. The first Saturday of their break we took an outing as a family. We went to the other side of town to see a "mall" that we had heard about. The mall isn't much but for the kids it was wonderful because we stumbled upon a Chuck E. Cheese type store (minus the pizza). The kids rode the indoor carousel (boy did it go around fast) and while the girls got their faces painted, Isaiah rode a second time. Then from there we found a movie theatre. The majority of movies are played in English. Of course we had to go because "Frozen" was playing. This was a special treat for our family and actually the first time to go as a family of five.
Decorating for Christmas for me was somewhat of a challenge. You can buy fake trees but they are soooooo expensive. One Sunday afternoon we asked our guard to find us a live tree that came up to his shoulders. He left and about 30 minutes later returned with…..well, huge branches from a pine-type tree. Hmmmm, what to do? We made it work. We turned the branches on their side, tied them up with twine (which has become my best friend) and put them into a red plastic bucket. Oh my! What a tree but let me tell you, the smell was wonderful.
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| Found a broken mirror, took out the glass, wrapped it in twine and hung ornaments. |
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| Our advent candle holder is an oatmeal can wrapped in twine. |
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| The stockings were hung with twine and the "tree" was held together by twine. We did bring our Little People Nativity with us. |
Christmas Eve was spent with our House Group. We had a wonderful evening meal together followed by a time of worship through song and reading of Scripture. Afterwards we each opened a present (the week before we had drawn names).
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| Christmas Eve 2013. Sofia 9, Selah 6 and Isaiah 3. |
Christmas morning Kevin and I woke up to Selah running upstairs saying, "Santa really came, Santa really came." The kids weren't sure if Santa would come to Africa. But alas, he did. He brought them candy and one gift each. We also each received one gift from the family.
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| All gifts were handmade. |
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| Our gifts to the kids this year was a pillow. |
After breakfast we drove across town to spend the day at the Sheraton Hotel pool. This was our gift from Gramma and Papa Bill. We enjoyed the day swimming, relaxing, eating burgers, grilled cheese and fries, and getting sunburn. Ha! It seemed as if we were miles away from our city.
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| My view on Christmas day. Ahhhhh. |
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| The outside temp was about 73 degrees and the pool water was almost as warm. |
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| The girls swam for almost six hours. |
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| After lunch, Isaiah settled in for a nap under an umbrella. |
Merry Christmas!!!!!!
