A Guatemalan Christmas

Merry Christmas! 

This week has been hard as I thought about celebrating Christmas away from home and missing all of the usual events and traditions that my family has.  But I'm very blessed to have my Guatemalan family here to celebrate with and to experience something new.  It has certainly been interesting! 

Mary and Joseph probably didn't want to go back to Nazareth and chill in Bethlehem for a few years, let alone have a baby in a stable there.  But God was, of course, leading and guiding them the whole way, providing for them and giving them family with which to celebrate, like the shepherds and the wise men.  Now, I'm not trying to make myself like the "holy family," but my comparison is what it has been in practically every blog post, simply that God brings us through hard times, and I know that he is providing for me and leading me, like he did with Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and the wise men. 

So, a Guatemalan Christmas is really interesting.  We went to church last night, which lasted about 2 hours, and then we ate dinner there, which we had prepared here at home during the day yesterday for everyone.  Traditional Christmas meal is tamales and "ponche" to drink, which is sort of like apple cider with cinnamon, but with less of an apple taste and more of a sugar taste, with lots of fruit in it, like pineapple, papaya, and coconut.   But since tamales are kind of expensive and time consuming to prepare, we had chicken sandwiches with ponche.  It was really good, and fun for everyone to spend time together.  The church service was good, though almost totally without Christmas carols, which was the most noticeably different thing about the service for me.  One very exciting thing for me was that the husband of one of the woman I've been meeting with came to church last night and gave his life to Christ!  The woman has become a dear friend and I'm working on a blog post totally about her because she has been helping me a ton with my quilt and she's a very precious young woman.  Her husband is abusive and controlling and typically does not come to church with her.  He punished her when she was baptized in October and gave her a very hard time when she defied him and got baptized when he told her not to.  It's very cool that he has surrendered his life and please pray that his life and his family will be transformed. 

So, after church we came home and watched a movie through the projector onto the wall in the Casa de Refugio, because it's really big and could hold a whole bunch of us watching in there.  Several of us family members, along with a few teenagers and a few men from the breakfast for alcoholics joined us for this.  Now, if you're calculating, all of this would bring us to close to midnight!  At midnight, we ran to the roof and watched tons of fireworks being shot off all over the city.  It was pretty incredible, and really, can you think of a better celebration of the birth of Christ than with fireworks??  :)  Normally I get kind of angry with all the people shooting off firecrackers around here because it's constant and very loud, but this time it was really cool.  After the fireworks and wishing everyone a Feliz Navidad, we finished watching the movie.  I finally went to bed at 2, though several others stayed up until 5, 6, or 7 this morning, and it is customary to stay up all night, play games, watch movies, and open presents if you have them. 

Today was a great day too.  We slept in, played Monopoly (I won!) and the family opened presents that they had been sent from a good friend in the US.  After that, we had a really good turkey dinner and ice cream sundaes!  Overall, a very Merry Christmas, and hope you all had a blessed Christmas as well!