It's Christmas time in the City!

Christmas is upon us! Tomorrow is Christmas Eve and I am still wrapping presents, as I am sure many of you are also doing. We have some big plans for our Christmas here. Christmas Eve we will have a mexican fiesta with tacos and fajitas. Jared has put together a lessons and carols for us, I am looking forward to that! Then Christmas morning we will all get together for a big breakfast and open our secret santa gifts.

We try to make it feel like Christmas by playing some good music, we have also been celebrating advent together these past four weeks. However, in our city and even out here where we live the environment is not filled with lights, decorations, or the excitement you can feel from others at this time of year.

Yesterday, Jared and I had a date night in the city and found a few spots that were lit up with Christmas Cheer! Here are some of the pictures.

And today it snowed! (This took 3 days to finish so the top part was written before 2 days before Christmas, now it is 2 days after Christmas!)I know for many of you it was a white Christmas, but well ours came 2 days too late! We are staying in tonight to stay safe and warm from the below freezing weather.

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Muffins!

Recently we have had some Christmas parties. Christmas parties are always fun and over here it is a great time to tell about the true meaning of Christmas. We just love it, but are so busy because of it. So it has literally been since Thanksgiving since I have posted...very sorry. It's just a busy time for everyone no matter where on this planet you live!

At these parties we received many many new funny gifts. I received a lot of good luck bracelets, Jared received a hilarious coffee cup...I must take pictures and post about that one! But we also received a lot of fruit, I mean a lot! We received more than 10 pounds of bananas, probably over 15 pounds. Anyway, there they are sitting on the floor, still in the bag, of our kitchen. We have eaten 8 of them but there are 15 still left and they are now to the point where I don't like to eat them anymore! yuck! So, this afternoon while procrastinating preparing my oral language speech to give in the morning I began making banana muffins!

Sorry for the sideways-ness of the picture, but they are muffins who cares!

This is wonderful because we are now out of the granola bars and pop tarts we brought with us here and this makes a super easy breakfast! I have only made one batch but I should soon have around 60 muffins I can enjoy.  I think this is a much better choice than nasty mushy bananas.

Turkey and some friends!

Happy Thanksgiving.....a week late!

I finally got some pictures from some of our friends who celebrated Thanksgiving on this side of the world with us so I can give you a great update.  A lot of friends and family ask how we celebrate while we are over here so I thought I would give everyone a glimpse into our Holiday festivities.

Wednesday night the girls got together to prepare some of our deserts and make preparations for the side dishes that would be made the next day.  I made an apple pie and pumpkin pie.....from scratch! Pie crust can be a pretty difficult thing to make but I had some great help from the other girls and they were done in no time at all! They turned out flakey and delicious.

We had quite a feast of mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, dressing, gravy, rolls, green bean casserole, corn casserole, deviled eggs, and of course turkey!  For dessert there were my pies of course plus chocolate pie, and wonderful pumpkin bars.  I am getting hungry again just thinking about the delicious food we ate that day...and the next.

We can easily get all the ingredients...for a pretty penny. What takes the cake here though is the turkey. I have never talked to a person here that has ever eaten a turkey before! Needless to say turkeys are rare to find and you have to plan pretty far in advance to reserve one at a specialty store or western hotel. We got our turkey for the low price of $117!  When I talked to my mom on the phone she said she got her turkey for free, and I am pretty sure ours was 1/2 the size!

After the big meal we watched Elf and Home Alone to get us in the Christmas Spirit. We played some games Mofia and Mexican Train (all the way from 12 down to 0).  It was quite late when we finally got home.

Since our mornings are your evenings we watched the A&M vs. t.u. game on Friday morning.  We stayed up late and had to get up a bit early to watch the game but I think it was well worth it. The best game of the season, even if we didn't win. I am proud of our Ags they put up a great fight! Plus we just ran out of time!

I hope your Thanksgiving Day was a wonderful one where ever you were. Now on to Christmas!