Molly in Africa

Monday, December 28, 2009

Holiday Celebrations!

Ok, so I’m a little behind on blogs… I’m working on it though. So to catch you up on the holidays…

THANKSGIVING: We celebrated Thanksgiving this year, similarly to last year. We had over 30 people at our house, wearing pilgrim and Indian headbands and we entertained them with a Thanksgiving play written by one of my housemates, Chris. Our guests ranged in nationalities from American to Malawian, Australian to Kenyan and we even had a Canadian! One thing we did differently this year is we cooked all the food ourselves… it was awesome! A lot of work, but it made the event that much more enjoyable in the end. J

CHRISTMAS: So many of the traditions that we do in the States surrounding Christmas are not common around here. For example, stockings… I’ve never seen anyone do that here. Even Christmas trees… while there are some fake ones sold, it’s not common to have them. While last year we just went with the Malawian flow and didn’t include those traditions in our celebration, this year we did and it was really fun! We all played Santa to one another and filled the stockings and had a fun revealing on Christmas day. For our Christmas tree, we decorated this massive cactus tree right next to our house. Since it’s the rainy season, we had to be creative with how to decorate it but we managed to come up with dyed water in small plastic bags… it worked perfectly! For Christmas dinner, we had the Brothers community over and enjoyed the feast we collectively prepared and the familiar company of one another.

While of course I missed being home for the holidays, I have to say we did a darn good job of making the holidays enjoyable far from home!