We were schedule to go the the Tweedy's house (one of the other american families here) for dinner, but my gimp knee kept me from getting out of the house. They were gracious enough to come to our apartment, along with another young family here who could not travel to see their families this Christmas. We finally got our Turkey! We were able to get ahold of two turkey's for Christmas dinner and it was well worth the wait. We had to get two, becuase they were only about 6 pounds each. I have never seen a turkey so small. It still tasted like Turkay and that was good enough for me. The biggest treat however was finding cranberries! We found a supermarket that had temporarily set up an international fruit section and they had packages of Ocean Spray cranberries. It was almost like being home.
However, no matter how good the turkey and cranberry sauce was, we were not able to share it with our family. This was the first Christmas that we have celebrated apart from our families and it was definitely strange. Stacey's parents came for a visit at the beginning of December and that certainly helped, but it still was different. It really made my heart go out to those who were apart from their families this Christmas, under much worse circumstances than ours. We have friends in Iraq that were not able to spend Christmas with their families, and friends in prison who cannot share a meal with their family. We truly are blessed to be doing what we are doing and still see our family a couple of times a year. It's a small price to pay and we wouldn't trade it for the world.
New Year's is celebrated in the same way that we are used to. Staying up late and a new year marked with firework's. We were able to watch a great display from our living room window. I attempted to wake up Noah to watch them and he informed me, "I've seen fireworks before, I want to go back to sleep". We stayed in to ring in the new year. It was strange to not be able to watch the ball drop in Time's Square, but it also would have happened at 6:00am our time. I would not have gotten up to see it even if it was on TV.
Here are some pictures from our Christmas.
