Merry Tropical Christmas

 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.

Hanukkah and Christmas Decor

The first night of Hanukkah fell on the Sunday after Thanksgiving this year, and the girls really wanted to get Christmas set up, so there wasn't much time to rest on our Thanksgiving laurels.  The show must go on!

We got out all the red and green boxes, and the girls worked on setting up the Christmas tree.

We found some local powered lights, and Elena was in charge of making sure they actually worked.

Both the girls helped put ornaments on the tree and nothing broke!  Hopefully we're as lucky getting everything off the tree too.

This will be Jeff and my 15th Christmas since we founded our own branch of the Goerss family.

We didn't get the village set up right away, so there was space to do the Hanukkah candles.  We learned the hard way though that Viv needs something under her menorah to catch the wax.

Even though we weren't finished doing all the decorations, the tree was done, which was enough for Pixie.  We found her enjoying the tree the next morning.

Elena was especially delighted to see her and proceeded to catch her up on the events of the past year.  The best holiday present so far though has been Elena's first Covid vaccine shot.  They had a clinic at the embassy after school, and there was definitely a festive atmosphere in the air.  She said it didn't hurt, and her only side effects were a slightly sore upper arm the next day.  She can't wait for her second shot.

We continued with our Hanukkah celebrations throughout the week, including a meal of fried food, although it was a little different this year.  We didn't have latkes, but we had fried chicken, fried rice, stir fried vegetables, and Noby revealed that she can make spring rolls from scratch, so she fried some of those up for us too.

I finally got around to setting up the village, and Jeff gave me a new building as an early Christmas present.  It's a gin distillery! The water wheel moves and everything.  It's a big hit, and it fits in really well.

We have part of the village on the dresser,

part on the card table,

and a few rebels on one of the side tables.

As you can see, it didn't take long for the toys to show up, and the annual sagas to begin.

This one though, I think is the story with the most potential ;-)

We celebrated being fully set up by watching a Christmas movie (photo courtesy of Vivian).

The Marine Ball is usually in November, but with all the things going on this year, it got delayed until December.  At first we weren't going to go, but a bunch of our friends were going, and we figured it would be fun to get dressed up.  Jeff got a suit made, and he had a shirt to match my dress, so we felt very fancy and had a good time.

We stayed overnight in the hotel which had a view of the Pavilion shopping center and a peek at one of the towers.  We had a lot of fun people watching.

The girls continued Hanukkah without us, and they were very proud that they could sing the songs all on their own.  We were home the next night for the final night of Hanukkah, and we all sat down together to enjoy the lights.

The girls have a few more days of school, and then they have three weeks off for the holidays.  It's been a great start to the holiday season, and we'll try to do some fun things to keep them busy and festive while they're off of school.