A very British Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The Official Christmas Report
A a few of my friends have asked me what differences we've discovered about the way Christmas is celebrated in the UK.  A few observations:
-Christmas seems like a much more formal event. LOTS of going to church and listening to the angelic sounds of boy choirs. Everyone we know enjoyed a candlelit dinner on Christmas evening and we were in awe of the massive, richly decorated Christmas tree in our church (which looks like a cathedral inside). Gorgeous!!
-We discovered Christmas "crackers." These are not Christmas appetizers, but in fact are little presents with a small popper firework attached to the packaging. When you open your present with a "pop," candy and silly jokes spill out. Here was my joke:
"What do you say when you finally see pigs fly? I guess the price of bacon just went up!" (Nick and I thought it should have said "Now you have a bad case of swine flu (flew)." These cheesy joke companies should really hire us!
-We ate sticky toffee pudding, bread sauce and mince pies for the first time ... traditions our tummies will always welcome. We also ate something called "bubble and squeak" which we may not try to replicate any time soon (It's based on Christmas dinner leftovers, to give you an idea).
--Liam discovered the joy of wrapping paper. He loves the crinkle, he loves the crunch, and he, unfortunately, likes to munch! He was pretty sly. He would reach his tiny hands out toward whoever was sitting beside me as if to wave, then he would snag the paper and immediately try to ingest it. He'd finish with a huge smile, completely winning over whoever's paper he just tried to destroy. For the most part, I kept him to his own paper, but he made the most of it.
--We are so thankful for the Christmas cards, photos and care packages from our family and friends. It was fun to have some cute things under the tree and I loved hanging a Baby's First Christmas stocking. I couldn't wait until Christmas for most of the things that came in my care package, so we gradually opened them up in the days leading up to Christmas. Very fun to have Christmas for a month!

Mixing new and old traditions
We loved that we were able to celebrate Christmas as our own little family, sitting around the tree looking at the lights, listening to Bing croon away and sipping hot chocolate. We read some of the Scripture that foretells Jesus' coming and then read the Christmas story on Christmas day.

We ate Christmas dinner with the Edwards family (imagine six kids plus cousins, neighbors and grandparents and you can just imagine the fun and chaos. At one point, Liam had four little girls surrounding him on a blanket making faces at him. Our little socialite LOVED the attention!

When we opened a few little presents after dinner, I sat next to a sweet little old neighbor lady who had attended Oxford in the 1950s. She told me all about attending lectures by C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. According to her, Lewis had a barrel chest and a booming voice, but you couldn't hear a word Tolkien said unless you sat in the first three rows of the lecture hall.


Cookies across the globe--and other Christmas highlights

The week before Christmas, we enjoyed a biscuit (biscuit is the British word for cookie) exchange with people from our building (Summertown House).  I had been wanting to get to know more of our neighbors and thought it might be a good chance to share a little about our Christmas traditions and the meaning behind them with people from all over the world.
Just as I was about to put out signs announcing a Christmas party for the building, Nick saw Ben and Deanna--the other American couple from Wycliffe--putting up cookie exchange signs. They were hoping to do the same thing! So we joined forces and brought our Christmas tree down to the common room for decoration (it was easy to move since it is only three feet high) and I baked 3 dozen big fat, butter-filled sugar cookies with homemade icing.
 I was thrilled that I not only got to meet people from Egypt, Ghana and Georgia (the republic not the state), but I didn't even have to put up the posters! You can't get a better deal than that. I am so thankful for like-minded new friends like Ben and Deanna. They have been a great blessing to us here and we love living just down the hall from them. We even got to try out our double stroller with their daughter, Nora, inside when we babysat for them on Christmas Eve afternoon.

Nick and I topped off the holidays with a New Year's Eve at home eating homemade ginger cookies and watching fireworks from our balcony. The fireworks part was kind of a last-minute thought and we ran out barefoot in the FREEZING cold. I snagged Nick's boots from behind the balcony door, so we rang in the New Year each wearing one boot and hanging onto each other to stay warm! (I wasn't about to go back inside for more shoes and miss the glorious display!! Totally worth it. I still even have most of my toes.)

What was your favorite part of the holidays this year?