Christmas eve used to be one of tradition. We (meaning I) tried to combine some of the traditions from my family and Eric's family to come up with our own traditional Christmas stuff. That dream has long been abandoned. Since moving oversees, it seems impossible to carry these things on. Whether it is because we can't find the right ingredients for the food (and it could easily be that one day in July we might have the right stuff here but then a few months later it is no where to be found), we have ministry responsibilities or whatever, what is now traditional is not to not hold tightly to traditions.
In some ways that makes me quite sad but I am learning to flex. I think traditions are important and they give the kids some stability and something familiar to anticipate, so where we can, we do what we can. Other times, forget about it.
I thought our new tradition was going to be celebrating Christmas with Casa G on Christmas Eve. That is what we did for two years. Foolish me - thinking that would be the new normal. The Ministry of Education here is taking delight in messing with schedules and important holidays, so they only allowed schools (save ours, thank the Lord) the 24, 25, 31 and 1st off. That cut into the time the boys might normally have to visit family for a few days. So, in order allow them time to do this, we switched to the 22nd. That left Christmas Eve open.
We had a few invitations for different things but we finally settled on what I'm pretty sure was the best decision - because it was fabulous.
Our friends, the Reicherts, just had their third child almost a month early - although it sure seems that they had the date wrong because the baby, born a few days before Christmas eve, was pretty big and very healthy. Anyway, they didn't want to go anywhere so a few of us headed to their house. It was the perfect blend of friends, food, activity and inactivity.
They had set up a tent in their back yard a while ago for their ministry party. They had some old Christmas classic movies playing when we arrived.
My kids were pretty happy to discover that they also had left over cookies to decorate, since we never got to doing ours.
After a while of hanging out, we gathered in the family room to sing some Christmas carols. To me, this was the most perfect thing. There seems to be a shortage of Christmas carol singing opportunities in Quito for some odd reason.
Jack, the Reicherts' oldest fell asleep while we were singing - it was so precious.
Why have we never had a child that would do something like that?.....
GREAT evening. Great.
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