We've been looking forward to Christmas ever since we got here because we knew we'd have lots of opportunities to teach our friends about the nativity story, and get eachother presents. But on the day of Christmas eve, I woke up and cried for 4 hours solid. It takes more than December 25th, a tree and two presents under the tree to make Christmas. What's really funny is that I envisioned myself taking the high road and being strong and not wishing I could go home. That lasted all of 1 minute. And if anyone starts with me that that's not what christmas is about anyway, I challenge you to have christmas spirit 5 gazillion miles away from your family.
In my family, we spend a lot of time cooking together (I get to make the gravy) and we read all these children's christmas books that we've collected over the years. Then Christmas morning, my mom has a casserole prepared and all her beautiful tea pots and tea cups layed out and we enjoy breakfast with tea while we open presents one at a time.
In Scotts family, we also spend a lot of time cooking... Shanna makes her famous noodles and pies and cuts a little turkey into the crust of one pie. I make this cranberry relish with apples and pineapple and walnuts every one likes. Howard and Jason and Scott go outside and cook the turkey and the girls finish cooking. There's a fire in the fireplace if it's cold enough.... and of course, Christmas morning we open presents and then go see the grandparents, or they come to us.
But Christmas eve, I had to wake up and clean because dirt makes its way into our apartment at an alarming rate. Then I took a friend with me to the market to get all our cooking supplies.
I chose to make chicken stew, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, and strawberry cobbler.
To make the chicken stew, I had to get cream of mushroom soup and onion soup mix in a big city 5 hours from here. Then I bought corn (shucked it myself) and potatoes and a live chicken at the market. That's right- LIVE chicken. There's no tyson brand chicken breast on sale at the local walmart. I asked the lady I bought the chicken from to go ahead and slaughter it and de-feather it and remove the icky insides. She thought I was crazy when I said I didn't want the head, feet or organs. But she was lucky, because she got to keep them.
I brought the chicken home and sliced it up- used half for the stew and the other half to make chicken stock out of to boil the green beans in. The chicken stock made our apartment smell so yummy! I set the chicken in a tiny crock pot for about 8 hours. It, too, smelled so good!
To make the sweet potato casserole, I searched our city for sweet potatoes... I followed my nose to a woman who was baking them and selling them. They are different than American sweet potatoes... they are white on the inside, and a very different texture. But I bought 5, boiled them and skinned them and mashed them, and mixed them with brown sugar (yay, our city has brown sugar) (it's actually 'red sugar' here) and topped them with marshmallows (that we found in another city) and put them in our little oven (its an oversized toaster oven) until the marshmallows were all fat and golden. yum!
The green bean casserole was easy- I let the green beans stew in chicken stock (that I made from half the chicken I got at the market) (I added onion, carrot, spices) and then mixed it with cream of mushroom soup and put it in a casserole. I topped the casserole with french fried onions- that I made myself!! (I bought purple onion, sliced it thin, and double dipped it in egg white and flour and fried it up in my wok) When the casserole was almost done, I added some white cheddar (that we bought in the other city). yum!
What's really fun, is we recently fired up our coal stove- it has a flat top so we can cook on it. That makes my life a little easier, since we only have one hot plate... if we tried to use two at the same time, it would trip the circut breaker. We can only plug about 5 or 6 things in at a time.
For the strawberry cobbler... you guessed it, I bought the strawberries in the other city. Since we're in the mountains, they don't grow here right now. I used cornstarch and sugar to make the filling, then mixed in the strawberries and put it in a casserole dish. I topped it with a flour mixture that made a top crust...I picked this recipe because it didn't call for a top and bottom crust.... pie crusts are not my forte.
Last, I made some biscuits to go with the stew, and we ate while watching Home Alone.
We opened our presents to eachother... Scott gave me a beautiful scarf and the Lion King movie... I got him a basketball and the next season of 24's 2 hour preview.
Thank you so much to our family who spent a lot of money to ship presents here. It helped, having more presents to open.
I got scrapbooking presents from Howard and Debbie and from Brigitte and John, and I got a swiffer mop from Jason and Shanna. It's REALLY hard to say which I love more. I've swiffered this apartment 10 times since I got it! It cuts down my cleaning time by an hour.
I miss all of my friends and family so much. I'm so glad Christmas is over, simply because I don't have to be reminded of how much I wish I could be home.
We do have 2 months of break from our classes to look forward to! And pretty soon, we're vacationing in Thailand!!! I bet that beats everyone else's spring break! ha!
Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year, every one!
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