Christmas: Mongolian Style Part 1

Wow! It is hard to believe that Christmas has already come and gone. Some of you may be lamenting how quickly the festivities go by while others of you may be releaved that it is over. Whichever attitude you may have, allow us to share our Christmas time with you.

Our festivities began earlier in December when we purchased a small Christmas tree from one of the local stores. It is a great little tree about three feet tall! We bought a box of lights and a few ornaments to "spruce" it up a bit. It is amazing how much Christmas cheer a little tree can bring. Included in subsuquent packages were two stockings and a few more ornaments. All together, this little minagery helped us get more into the Christmas spirit.

However, as we all know, Christmas is about far more important things than just a few decorations. Christmas is about the time with family and friends. Unfortunately, since we are currently living on the other side of the planet we were unable to physically visit with our friends and family in the States. We were not able to attend any of the Christmas parties or drink any of the Egg Nog (not real upset about the Egg Not part), but we were able to spend some time with our new friends here. We actually did have a Christmas party at our home on the afternoon of Sunday December 20. We set this time as an opportunity to gather once again with our students from the two-week pracitcum course that we taught the end of November. Eight of our students were able to come! We were very excited to see them all again and to share a little more of our lives with them. Our teammates and one of our leaders were in attendance as well bringing our party total to 13 people and 1 cat. This is not bad at all when you consider how large our apartment is. This may not seem delightful to some of you (especially with those Christmas parties still fresh in you minds), but it was such a wonderful time! The close proximity aided in conversation. We ate homemade soup and stew (made with horse meat) for lunch and then had decorated Christmas cookies for desert. After several hours of visiting and showing pictures, we Americans shared some of our Christmas traditions, we all read a few portions of the Christmas story in both English and Mongolian, and sang two Christmas carols. Once we were all finished our students presented us with gifts. We were given a beautiful wolf picture painted onto leather as well as a leather pencil case and a leather key holder. No one really wanted to leave, but several of them had things they needed to do. Four of the students stayed to watch the Nativity Story movie on the big screen (we barrowed the company projector for the evening). Before everyone left, we set a time to get together with them again after the start of the new year. Several of them have continued to send us text messages and e-mails. We are very exctied to have these new friends and look forward to future opportunities to share with them!

Unfortunately, none of us thought to take pictures during the party. This is a really good picture of our students on the last day of our practicum session.

Following the Christmas party, we had our sights set on Christmas day and a three day weekend. We have been working very hard the past few months and were looking forward to a little time to rest and reflect. Our week was busy but went by without any problems. The anticipation continued to grow all week. Last year, Christmas was kind of a depressing time for us. This year, we got more giddy the closer it got. We may be far from home, but the joy this Christmas was overly abundant!

On Christmas Eve, we invited our teammates and Muhammad (one of our new friends) over to our apartment for dinner. We feasted on Italian Stallion (a dish of horse meat stewed with Italian seasonings and served on a piece of bread) and vegitables. We drank hot tea, played games, laughed, and shared the joy of the holiday together. This was also the first Christmas that Muhammad has ever celebrated before. What a treasure to be able to celebrate it with him for the first time!! We were all tired, so we parted around 8:30. We went to bed that night anticipating a good night's sleep and Christmas morning!