Christmas and New Year's Festivities and a Trip to the Coast

Letting two weeks go by without a blog entry over holidays was probably a mistake. So much has happened in the past two weeks that it is hard to keep track. Fortunately there is an ample photo record. It is a sad irony that when there is more going on, there is less time to write, and that has certainly been the case since the holiday season began.

In my last entry around mid-December we had just returned from a team retreat in Zanzibar. By the time we returned the Christmas season began moving into high gear beginning on the 21st with an evening of lessons and carols at our church. Our choir, of which Rebecca and I are a part, has been rehearsing for quite a while for this and we had 4 special songs to share during the evening. The event was on a Friday of the week we returned and it was a fitting end to a very busy week of reviewing quarterly reports from all of our partners and getting them into our database. Despite the flurry of productivity, the office seemed relatively quiet as Chrispin was on vacation and others were in and out. 

The Lessons and Carols service went very well, and I thought we sounded great! There were many parts to the service including Sunday school children singing Away in a Manger, many favorite Christmas hymns, a brass quartet, harp solo, and a soloist singing Rejoice O Daughter of Zion from Handel's Messiah. Grandma Jean and the kids came and endured arriving an hour and a half early and watched patiently. Oren seems to be developing a real sense of ritual about certain traditions. Although it was a few days early, it stood in for our Christmas Eve service since there was not going to be one on the 24th. 

We did go to church on the 22nd though as it was a Sunday and Rebecca was preaching. She did a fabulous bit of theologically correct performance art by portraying the Blessed Mother looking back on her life and remembering her betrothal to Joseph and visitation by the Angel Gabriel. I could not do it justice by description but it had a big effect on the congregation, especially because she did not begin by saying what she was doing. It started out sounding like she was talking about herself. One poignant turn of phrase was when she remembered fretting about getting older and still living at home-- 18 and not yet married! "I was no beauty!" (she confided to the congregation.) I asked her about that statement and she told me that the idea of Mary not being beautiful was like T.H. White's portrayal of Sir Lancelot as having a hideous face in The Once and Future King which we had listened to a month earlier. Also it paralleled Isaiah 53's description of Jesus who "had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him."  I think Oren even liked it. 

Christmas Eve was eventful nonetheless as we waited for midnight clatter of our taxi driver bringing Papa Dave from the airport, arriving on the KLM evening flight. We watched the Polar Express, the last and favorite of our Christmas movies as we waited. He arrived on cue laden heavily with gifts in two enormous suitcases from many family members back home. (We late into the wee hours of the morning to get them wrapped and under the tree.)

Christmas morning came early for the kids despite the late eveing waiting. They were up around 6, and I told them they had to wait to get the grandparents up until at least 7 before opening Christmas gifts. I finally let them open a set of legos to help them pass the time. 

We had our traditional Christmas cinnamon rolls (made by Jean several days before) for breakfast, then began the daunting project of opening our many gifts. (Having 2 sides of the family sending gifts from the US meant there were quite a few. )

The kids were thrilled to get a number of legos and STEM type craft projects along with many new family games and books. (A real group effort to come up with things that would compete with screens.) They both got deeply into building lego technics sets by mid morning. 

Rebecca led the adults in preparations for our Christmas dinner to which we had invited our friends the Taylors, and a new German family who is joining our small group as well. Rebecca had prepared a ham, as well as several side dishes. 

The kids and I had worked the day before on what was to be the coup de gras, a gingerbread train--steam engine, coal car, and box car. We have a tradition of a gingerbread construction each year, usually a castle or church, but this year we were more ambitious. Rebecca and I looked up good reciptes for construction gingerbread (without leavening). I added my own touch (extra treacle) to make it actually taste good. We also looked up recipes for eggless royal icing (since one of the guests was alergic) we did find a good substitute that used corn syrup in place of egg and it worked well. 

before decorating

The design and construction went well enough. Our convection oven made baking fast and allowed for multiple layers of trays to be cooked at once. I used the molten sugar for epoxy to put it together, and in the early stages it looked good. We covered it with icing on the boiler and roofs of the cars to look like snow. We used chocolate chips for coal. (the boiler for the engine was actually a chocolate muffin mix baked in a can to make it round. We added candy and decorations and for about an hour it looked great. But, the integrity of the gingerbread with all the weight on the wheels and the humidity of Arusha during this season began to slowly melt it. By the time it was served the next day it had pretty much collapsed. A bit disappointing but we did have some pictures before it fell apart. Since it was falling apart it made people more bold in destroying it to eat it. The taste was excellent!

Our guests arrived mid-afternoon bearing many other side dishes including a Christmas cake (fruit cake) and an icecream cake made out of Christmas cake which was delicious. (The Taylors are Australian and these were traditions down under.) The kids had a great time playing together. Adults visited and we had a very nice Christmas dinner.

The party seemed to continue the next day when we all got together as a small group at Pamoja, a compound where one of the family's live. This was a lot of fun and included a staggeringly large collection of kids the ages of both David and Oren. It was great to see Oren hanging out with 6 other young teenage boys. The event was a potluck and we brought many left overs. Dave and Jean had a good time as well finding common ground with a number of the parents and grandparents gathered there-- all with extensive cross-cultural experience.

After the festivities of Christmas and Boxing Day, we found we had one free day in Arusha before we were to leave on vacation on the coast. So we booked a tee time at Gymkhana and Dave Sack, the kids, Rebecca and I played 9 holes of golf. It was really quite amusing. We had 3 caddies between us and had to rent everything. But the cost was under $100 for all of us and rental of clubs. David Sack had the most experience and it showed whenever he drove the ball in a straight line off th tee. David Mosley was probably second best with regard to consistency. I could hit the ball quite far, but usually missed 2-3 times and when I did hit it was not unusual for my ball to land in the middle of a neighboring fairway (or even 2 away.) The caddies were very helpful with coaching. I am hoping we have more opportunities to do this in the coming year. 

The zenith of our Christmas break was to be our trip to Pangani beach on the East coast of Tanzania. We had gone last year with Dave and Jean and were looking forward to a return trip. In order to make the 9 hour drive a bit more bearable we rented a van in hopes it would be cooler than the MCC Landrover. Sadly the airconditioner on the rental van as well as the sliding door was not working so we were pretty hot going down. We did listen to Artemis Fowl on the trip which was good though-(highly reccommend for kids).

We got to Peponi Beach Resort in the late afternoon where we spent 5 days and nights relaxing on swinging beds by the beach, swimming in the ocean and pool, snorkeling, doing water colors, reading, and enjoying delicious seafood meals every night. New Year's eve was not too exciting for us but the hotel did have a lovely banquet with many tasty dishes. I am including a selection of photos below to catch the atmosphere, and will leave it at that for now.

We are back in Arusha again and Rebecca is preparing for her trip to Uganda for the Great Lakes Initiative where she is leading music. She will be gone for a week and I will be home with kids. Fortunately Grandma Jean will stay for the week as well, so it should be manageable. More news later.

PHOTO highlights from Peponi beach. (more can be seen at: Pangani photos)