We're back to celebrating the holiday season in a tropical climate. It's hard to get that cozy Christmas feeling when it's 90 degrees outside, but there are definitely advantages to not being cold. It's also nice that Christmas decorations are a big thing here and the community we belong to, both the embassy and the larger expat community, all make an effort to have fun during the holiday season.
Vivian's first gift was a trip to the movie theater to see Spider Man No Way Home. The movie was really good, and we had fun taking pictures in the fully set up Christmas "village" at the center of the mall.
Elena also got in some early Christmas fun at the embassy event to meet Santa. She was excited to make the "nice list".
They also had cookie decorating, but her favorite activity was a snowball fight with The Grinch.
The next day, Vivian and I went to the mother daughter Christmas tea at the ambassador's residence.
While Jeff took Elena to a laser tag birthday party.
The girls have three weeks off of school, so I had the week before Christmas to keep them busy. Luckily, the weather cooperated, and I took them to the pool a couple times.
One of our neighbors even got an early Christmas present and let the girls try it out.
Elena also had a doubly exciting day with a hair cut and her second vaccine shot.
She didn't have any side effects from either shot, but she did have a little bruise where she got the shot, which she proudly showed off and explained to anyone who noticed.
On the day before Christmas, we went into food mode. We started the day off by walking to Sausage KL, which is a restaurant and store about a mile away. They serve breakfast, and the girls enjoyed their pancakes.
We also picked up a bunch of pork products, a "honey baked ham" (not what we're used to from the States, but the best we could find here on short notice) and lots of sausage for sausage balls.
When we got home, Vivian's food inspiration continued. We had had friends over for dinner earlier in the week, and they brought delicious Christmas sugar cookies. Vivian got the recipe from them and proceeded to make us our own batch of sugar cookies. She even let Elena help.
We let the cookies cool and got down to the business of eating dinner. We had fresh pineapple to decorate the ham. I made scalloped potatoes, and Noby made broccoli and spicy morning glory.
After dinner, we had a lot of fun decorating the cookies. Our friends had recommended these little icing tubes that came in packs of 5 different colors. I got us a few different boxes, so we had 10 colors to choose from. We had a lot of fun picking cookies and creating colorful tops for them.
I think Jeff got the most fun out of it though. He started by turning the "candy cane" upside down and making it a J instead.
But as he went on, he discovered a real gift for creating things.
One of our favorite creations was the "spider man snowman".
By the time we were done, we had a great collection
Noby stayed and decorated cookies with us, which was a lot of fun.
She also got the girls Christmas presents, so we let them open those early and thank her.
They both slept until a fairly reasonable hour the next day, so there was some daylight when we went to open presents.
We all had a lot of fun opening presents and oohing and ahhing over everything.
The biggest smile we got out of Elena though was later that day at a Christmas party when the family's dog settled itself on her lap. Our little animal lover grinned from ear to ear.
Overall, it was a low key Christmas, but there were lots of magical family moments.
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