Holidays

I apologize that it has been so long since I have posted. I don’t really believe in New Year’s Resolutions but it is my goal to post more often. Even if it is just a picture or something short and sweet.

Well, this holiday season was especially long for me. It started as normal with Thanksgiving but then it ended with Ethiopian Christmas which is January 7th. I already posted about Thanksgiving so I won’t talk about that again but we celebrated “ferengi” Christmas and “ferengi” New Year’s.

The New Zealand family and I planned a Christmas Eve dinner. We invited the BCI management staff and their families. It was a great evening of sharing our Christmas traditions with the habesha that have become family. We had “ferengi” food only and the habeshas loved it. We also decorated the house which was really cool. My sister sent me a gingerbread village kit so earlier in the day the NZ kids and I made gingerbread houses and we used those as decorations. The house looked really good.

In NZ they line up all the kids and throw candy at them and then the kids scramble around to get all of the candy. So we did that with the kids and they thought that was just amazing. We ended the evening by playing with sparklers.

Ethiopian New Year is in September so I had a “ferengi” New Year’s Eve with the NZ family. We had a wonderful dinner and we played cards and board games until midnight. I told the kids about the New Year’s Eve ball drop that happens in New York City and I pulled up the 2011 ball drop on YouTube so they could see it. Although, I remember the ball drop being bigger and flashier when I was little. What happened to it?

We ended the evening in prayer and then shot fireworks. On Sundays I do a home church with the NZ family. The Sunday after New Year’s the message was on putting off your old self. So we wrote down all of the bad habits that we have and things that we want to leave behind in 2011 and we burned them. It was such an awesome time to release the bad. We also wrote down goals (spiritually or otherwise) for 2012 and sealed them in an envelope. We are going to open the envelope in June and see how far we’ve come.

Ethiopian Christmas was an experience. I started the day with my daily morning run and on the way I saw many families in the streets slaughtering and skinning animals for their Christmas dinner. Right down the road from my house a bunch of men had killed a cow and they were skinning it. The pictures are kinda graphic but they tell the whole story. Still, 5 days after Christmas, there are random hooves in the road and in fields. The day after Christmas Kevin and I were walking home at night and right in the middle of our street there was a random cow head. It was gone the next morning so I assume a pack of dogs or hyenas ran off with it!

I went to Addis (Capital city of Ethiopia) on Christmas day and there were piles of skin along the road. Apparently when people skin the animals they then sell the skin so there were just heaps and heaps of animal skin! I tried to get pictures of that but I wasn’t able to. The interesting thing is that when they skin the animal they do it in one big piece. So basically they just de-stuff the animal. Other than the heaps of animal skin, Ethiopian Christmas is celebrated very much like how Americans celebrate Christmas. There are Christmas Eve services, feeding programs on Christmas, gathering with family and friends to eat a big meal, and gift giving.

The thing that isn’t here and that I definitely did not miss is the commerialization of Christmas. It was so nice to enjoy the holiday without being concerned or stressed about what I am going to buy for who or feeling obligated to buy something for everyone or to out-do whatever I bought for that person last year. It was great to just sit back and truly celebrate the real reason for the season. . .Jesus.