Our attempt to make a gingerbread house...

 Merry Christmas!!!! We were able to find this little Christmas tree here because Christmas trees and Santa Claus are associated with New Year's celebration here. (Thanks to once being a part of the Soviet Union) We have enjoyed several Christmas activities and celebrations with other foreigners such as caroling, Christmas cookies exchanges, and a home schoolers gathering which included constructing a ginger bread house.

 Here we are with a friend, getting ready for the construction. As you can see, Will was able to help by eating lots of the candy intended for decorating.

 There were several families who gathered together for presentations for the kids and we each brought the materials for a house. If we had been in the States, I'm sure I would have made a Walmart run for one of those handy dandy kits that would result in a beautiful house (not sure how tasty though!) However, instead I did a google search to find instructions and a recipe. The other families constructed beautiful homes, the beginnings of which you can see here.

Ours, however, was a little too large. We decided to leave the roof off until we got home. However, it fell apart before we reached the car...... 

This is what we made it home with!

Anna and I tried to reconstruct but we ran out of icing.

 This little guy helped eat the icing

It stayed together for a few minutes. After it fell apart again, we decided to go ahead and cut it up into cookies and enjoy it while fresh. Very tasty!   Next year, maybe we will try a different design in the hopes it will stay up for a little longer.

We have Christmas boxes coming but are still on the way. I have heard from a couple of others who had boxes sent in mid-October which still haven't arrived.  We did some shopping this week so we have some items under the tree but it will be much simpler than some other years have been. It (not having our Christmas boxes) is good  for me in that we have a chance to make the emphasis of our Christmas be a celebration of Jesus.  We hope to have a fun family day, and maybe we'll be able to Skype with all our far away family as well. Last year we had the privilege of celebrating with both sides of the family (very unusual since our families are so spread out)

In an unrelated note, our home school helper, Lissie, left this week for a month long holiday visit with her family. She had quite an adventure getting home. You can read a little about it here