Natal-ification

I never thought that I would say this… but I kind of miss snow!  Ok not really but it does not seem like Christmas time when it is 100 degrees out and rainy and not -10 and snowy.  So I’m not sure I really miss snow or if it is just that I love Christmas time and it sure doesn’t feel like the holiday season as much as my roommate and I try to make it.   Believe me we have tried very very hard to make it seem like the holiday season.  We have been listening to Christmas music since getting to site and watching all the standard Christmas movies (I’ve watched Love Actually only twice this year though… so maybe that’s part of my problem).  Since that wasn’t working we decided that we should decorate, but we don’t have any of the usual Christmas decorations (left my lights in the states and there aren’t many Christmas trees here in Cuamba).  So what were we supposed to do!   Well when dealing with limited resources, you do the best you can… so luckily Sam had chalk, and we decided to draw a Christmas tree on our wall with it!  And when doing something like drawing on the wall… the old adage stands… GO BIG OR GO HOME!  So we gave ourselves a pretty large Christmas tree for the year…. Now the only thing it is missing is lights, I considered attaching candles to it, but decided that was probably more of a fire hazard than lights on a tree. So I didn’t risk it. 

Every kids dream... drawing on walls!

The finished project... feels like christmas!

The next step to our Christmas-ification was cookies!  We made homemade sugar cookies but couldn’t find any powdered sugar so we didn’t have frosting but we found sprinkles at one of the stores in town so we decorated with those.  And of course neither of us had cookie cutters but that was easy to replace with just a knife, although some of our shapes need a little imagination to figure out exactly what they were, but we had your typical, mitten, stocking, santa hat, snowmen, and more.  I even cut out the words HO HO HO.  The cookies turned out pretty well.

Some of our beautiful cookies!

Our final step was cooking a Christmas dinner for our site mates, but only Rich could come and being in Mozambique makes it a little harder to make traditional Christmas dinner foods like ham, so we made our new tradition or Christmas Chicken fajitas, including homemade tortillas.  For desert we made homemade cinnamon rolls which also turned out well but also would have been better with a little powdered sugar frosting.  To make it more Christmas-y we made hot apple cider… which was delicious!  Some of you might know… I love apple things (taste and smell) so this was AMAZING, by far the best thing so far!  Between that and our cinnamon rolls our house smelled delicious and even though it was a weird combination of foods, it was delicious!  And we finished out the night watching Home Alone… such a classic Christmas movie.

Who knew I was such a baker....

Christmas Chicken Fajitas!

To top off the holiday cheer, today while we were at the market, we stopped to look at capulanas and look what I found... 

Now if this doesn't add to my christmas cheer, I don't know what will!  Now I have an awesome Christmas Capulana to wear and to remember my first Christmas in Cuamba! 


Feliz Natal (Merry Christmas) Everyone!