So, another Christmas has come and gone again. It’s amazing how quickly a day can pass that people have been preparing for, for weeks! No matter how hard we try we can never make one day last a single second longer. That’s kind of depressing, but I’m not here to depress anybody so I’ll stop talking about impossibilities!

Okay back to Christmas. I had a happy and good Christmas and I’m very thankful for it. It was also kind of sad, because this will be our last Christmas with my older sister Olivia before she leaves for college. It’s hard to think of the future and not see her here with us in Congo. It’s going to be very sad without her. I’m going to miss her a lot.

It was a kind of crazy and tense time for the grownups, (and us kids) so it was a little bit hard for everybody to relax. But we finally did. Because of starting our school year a bit late, we kids didn’t have a lot of time off from school around Christmas, but it was enough time. The grownups didn’t have a lot of time off either. But we still had time to have fun, food, and presents!

Like every other year, my family and I all thought, “Maybe this year I’ll actually have my Christmas shopping and wrapping done before Christmas Eve!” We were all prepared to put up our tree and decorate for Christmas on the Saturday before the start of Advent, but we hesitated, since it seemed like November 29 was too early for us “Christmas-Eve-Shoppers” to get started. We said we should wait until December. Bad mistake. It was December when things started getting tense and busy around here. It was hard to focus on Christmas. We did try to though. We would go around and say to each other “Wow! I can’t believe that there’s only two weeks till Christmas!” and “It doesn’t feel like Christmas at all.” But it never really sunk in what time of year it was. So despite our efforts, when it was less than a week before the 25^th, none of us were really ready for Christmas. But we did finally realize it was Christmas just in time. It amazes me how quickly time can elapse under our very noses without us noticing! Thankfully, time wasn’t so sneaky that it found us without our faithful fake pine tree! So we weren’t totally unprepared for Christmas.

We actually did a lot more of Christmas-y stuff than I make it seem like! For example, we:

· sang Christmas songs,

· had a special Christmas Chapel service,

· made and ate Christmas cookies,

· had our traditional breakfast meal,

· had a party and a gift exchange,

· changed computer desktop pictures to Christmas-y things,

· decorated the house,

· put our tree up,

· said Merry Christmas to people,

· watched all the Christmas movies we could think of that somebody owned and that we had time for,

· listened to Christmas music,

· read the Christmas story,

· pondered Jesus’ birth,

· laughed,

· and I even practiced Silent Night on the flute!

We had a lot of fun.

The Christmas chapel service turned out to be very nice. It was held on the Sunday before Christmas day, which was the 20^th. During the service, people who had signed up did what ever they signed up to do, and some people came up and shared something that was on their heart, or sang a song. Everything sounded very pretty, (especially when my mom played “The First Noel” on the recorder with Danielle Ralston, we played her flute, and Rachel Maurais who played her clarinet,) but it was hard to concentrate at first when I was so nervous. A group of our Congolese friends and my sisters had prepared a song to sing. Everybody was very nervous, but we still did a good job. But even with that over, I wasn’t able to rest yet. I shook so bad when my sisters and I were announced. I was even more nervous for our second song. We had barely practiced our song twice, and we were singing it without any instruments so it was even more scary. But somehow, we got through it without me falling over.

When the service was over, there was some food for everybody. I and a few others helped pass out the napkins, peanuts, juice, little cakes, and banana bread. There were a lot of people there so it took a while to give everybody everything. By now my feet were starting to hurt some.

After everybody got some, I helped Dr. Wegner give the remaining food to some of the mothers (and children) in the hospital wards. As we did so, we wished them all a Merry Christmas.

The other party we had, was on the 23^rd. Wednesdays, the grownups usually have a team meeting to talk with each other about what's going on. Instead of doing that the week of Christmas, we had a Christmas party. We had a meal (mostly really good traditional African food), than sang some Christmas songs and than we had our gift exchange. A couple weeks before, when almost the whole team was together, my mom had written down all of the names of our team members and put them in a hat. Then we all drew out a name and whatever the name was that would be the person we had to get a present for. So on the 23^rd everybody gave each other their gifts. It’s really fun to see the reaction on people’s faces. We also put the last ornaments on our Jesse Tree and lit the last candle in our homemade Advent wreath. Everywhere you looked there was laughter, joy, and peace, even though there was also fatigue. It was very pleasant to just forget the worries of this world and think about Jesus, the one who matters the most.

Christmas Eve started out pretty much the same as every other day, except for a few things. One was that in the morning two of our friends, Octavie and Yvonne, got baptized. It was a blessing to be there, and wonderful that they got baptized. That is a very special memory. The rest of the day nothing else really happened. We just went about our business, finished wrapping our presents, and so on. So we all went to bed fairly early.

The day had finally come. It was December 25^th, Christmas Day. As usual my brother Noah and older sister Claire were the first ones up and the first ones to open their stocking and wake people up. J Noah got up at around 6am and then guess what he decided to do first? He rode around on the scooter and sang, “IT’S CHRISTMAS, IT’S CHRISTMAS!” Thankfully he only woke up one person, which was not me. But then Claire and Noah were rough housing, and that did wake me up. Once the house was awake, we had a breakfast/brunch of green eggs and ham, yogurt, granola, papaya, bananas, mango and guava juice, rolls, and muffins. After we cleared the table, we started opening presents. Some very good friends in America, the Kelleys, had given Christmas presents to my mom to bring here. There was a gift for each of us, given with love and we are all very thankful for them.

Once we were done opening presents (and taking little naps), we dressed up a little bit, and went next door to the Galipe's house for a party celebrating Jesus’s birth and the baptism that took place the day before. There was more really good food and dessert, and then Olivia took pictures of everybody dressed up. After that Noah started a game of monkey-in-the-middle with the football he got from the Kelleys. At first only the teen boys were playing but then others started joining in. I didn’t join in though. I was too full of food. J

After it got dark we gave our gifts the Galipes. With their smiles and words of thanks they left to watch a movie they had borrowed from us. It was really good to see their reaction to what we gave them.

The rest of the night was peaceful. Claire played a computer game that we had gotten from Rachel, and Noah and I watched her play. We never had an official supper that night. But that was okay with us because we were still stuffed to the brim. We still grazed on the leftovers from our big meals (to fill in the empty cracks in our stomachs) and we watched the movie It’s a Wonderful Life.

When the movie was done and it was late, we all slowly drifted to our beds. It was hard for me to fall asleep with all the excitement and joy from the day swimming around in my head. As I lay there in my bed, trying to sleep, I would be thinking about nothing in particular and the sudden memory of a happy moment from the day would fill me with such joy that I had to let it out somehow. So I smiled a huge smile to the dark. Somehow I think I got all the happiness of that day in that smile. I’m so glad God sent his son for us. That was the best Christmas present ever.