Merry Christmas!

Hope you have all had a wonderful holiday season.  Ours has certainly been different this year than our usual Christmas routine.  First of all, the hot, humid, steamy weather has not made it feel like Christmas time to us at all -- we have had to keep reminding ourselves!  I did bring back a string of lights that we put up in our apartment, so that helped us get into the spirit a little bit.

We weren't sure what to do about a tree -- unlike our home in the Northwest, there are really no evergreen trees here.  Some people do have fake Christmas trees, but we didn't want to go that route.  So... we made one out of green poster board and some creative pipe-cleaner decorations!

We rolled up our exercise mat (that Annalise is sitting on) to make it look like a tree trunk, and we put our presents under it.  It was kind of cute, and mainly in the better-than-nothing category.

In case you are wondering, Santa did manage to find us -- he brought a present for each of the kids and some stocking stuffers.  So we did manage to keep some of our own American Christmas traditions going this year.

Christmas traditions in our town in Ecuador are something different altogether.  The Christmas season basically starts after the big Guadalupe fiesta weekend (as previously detailed) in mid-December.  On December 16th, nine days before Christmas, there begins a Novena (a 9-day religious celebration) leading up to Christmas.  Unlike the Our Lady of Guadalupe Novena, this one is much more geared toward kids.  At 7pm every evening, there is a religious even led by the nuns, with singing of Christmas songs and reading Christmas bible stories.  All the kids dress up like Mary and Joseph, but in a very indigenous Latino peasant way.  Many of the boys wear typical South American ponchos and hats, and the girls wear two braids, indigenous clothing, and babies (dolls or stuffed animals) strapped to their backs.  Some kids come dressed like angels.  Our kids went the more Arab route.

Emmett and Annalise in front of the giant manger scene that the Sisters set up in the church 

The kids with Sister Julia, the "mother superior" of the 5 nuns in town, who was completely charmed by their outfits

The Novena was held in a different place in town every night, often in front of someone's home.  That person set up an elaborate manger scene in front of their house for the night, and set up chairs outside for people to sit in.  Then they fed everyone some food after the Novena was done.  I get the sense that it is an honor to be chosen to host one of the Novena events.  The Novena culminates with an evening Mass at the big church on Christmas eve, and then there is a Mass on Christmas day as well.  

There is really not a culture of gift-giving there like there is in the US.  Many families are barely scraping by, so there really is not a lot of money for buying presents -- but it also seems like it really isn't the tradition anyway, so it's not as if people feel they are missing out.  Instead, there is a tradition of giving out bags of candy and cookies -- it's almost more like an extended Halloween celebration (but focused on the Christmas story) rather than a big commercial holiday.  In fact, we really have not missed the crowded malls and one-day-sales-events of American Christmas at all.  It's nice to have it be a more quiet time focused on kids and the religious (rather than commercial) aspect of the holiday.

One thing we really noticed is that the Christmas music here is totally different.  While you will sometimes hear our familiar Christmas tunes (like Jingle Bells) being piped in from somewhere, the Ecuadorian Christmas songs are completely different, and much more of the South American musical tradition.  We have learned a couple of catchy songs that are now becoming more familiar to us.  But there is something about the Christmas music that we have been raised with that just feels so comforting and familiar, and gets you in that holiday mood -- and we have missed that.  We have missed the cold, and even the dark (if you can believe it), and we miss snow.  We are so grateful for this amazing experience the we are having -- but there is something about spending the holidays in a foreign land that makes you a little homesick.   Even though we had a great time opening our presents under our cute poster board tree, we miss all our family and friends.

We hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas!