First Christmas

Eden has never celebrated Christmas before ... but I think she likes it! She loves keeping all of her goodies in a stocking, especially her gum. She can chew it for hours! She likes getting presents, especially her little plastic tea set (it is hard to find nice gifts here, i.e. anything more than $5). Unfortunately she is not quite old enough to understand WHY we are celebrating Christmas. Hopefully all of Mongolia's children will come to celebrate the birth of Jesus!

Lots of silliness occurred during our Christmas break. Most of us had been sick one way or another, so we didn't do anything productive the entire time... but I realized that just living can be pretty hard work sometimes! How did the pioneers do it? How do Mongolians?!

Eden's 1st Christmas

We put up our decorations, which took about 15 minutes total, and we spend about that much time every day picking them up again as Eden takes ornaments off the tree, figures off the advent calendar, or pictures off the Waiting Tree. I think she likes Christmas! She is either cute as pie, walking around singing "Yesus, Yesus" (Jesus in Mongolian), or a mischeivious elf. Isaiah usually is too, but he has hardly gotten up from his bed all week with a fever! A blessed Christmas to all...

Christmas cookies

We had a very enjoyable weekend at our friends' (the Bergevins) new home in Bulgan (3 hours west of Darhan). They have 4 little girls and will hopefully begin some new projects and house churches there this next year... they've got their hands full! We had a lot of fun with them - for me that meant checking out their house's construction and contraptions,
and for the kids that meant playing and making Christmas cookies. Although I did enjoy a cookie or two myself...