WHAT?

No! Almost a year... already?

So I started to write my Christmas letter today. In fact our family even put up our Christmas tree today! It’s the earliest we have EVER done this as we usually have to wait till the start of December for the Christmas tree farms to open and make sure that the tree doesn’t die before the 25th.

Well there are no Christmas tree farms in Thailand and why would there be with less than one percent of the population being Christian!! I’m quite surprised there are even fake ones, but I am glad that there are... and happy to report that the Cross Family are the proud owners of such a tree. Plastic fantastic!! Instead of spraying the tree with insect spray to kill any bugs, we carefully ‘fluffed’ out all the fake branches trying to make it look as realistic as possible. Hmmm.

The things you thought you’d never be doing! Living in Thailand and putting up a fake, plastic Christmas tree in November. Ha ha.

On Friday we will be joining with the other missionaries for a huge THANKSGIVING dinner. I am so excited. I also feel a little bit nervous though because I am bringing a salad and dessert and I have NO IDEA what to make. I was going to google “thanksgiving” and see what I could find... pumpkin pie??? But then someone suggested we bring something that Australians eat!! Dave asked whether pavlova would be okay to which NO ONE even knew what this was!!!! Well I guess if I make it and it doesn’t taste any good, no one will know the difference, right?

Speaking of food. Dave’s favourite ‘take-away’ (from the side of the road) food is called moo-ping. It’s sticky rice and marinated pork skewers. We were hearing all about his moo-ping consumption constantly but now that we’ve tried it Eli, Spencer and I are also hooked!! Spencer will ask us “Ahroy mai?” which means “Is it delicious?” and then we say “Ahroy mak”, “Very delicious”. He is learning new words every day in both Thai and English. It’s very cute.

On Saturday we had a special day at ZOE with the short term team that was visiting. They were running elective classes for all the ZOE kids and invited our children along too. Tobi and Eliana joined in with the Christmas traditions group. They very much enjoyed hearing the Christmas story that was told using a felt board, colouring wooden Christmas angels for the tree and making Christmas boxes. The highlight though was the gingerbread house decorating. You should’ve seen all the kids eyes light up as thy were led in to a room full of ready made houses and HUGE bags of lollies.

Here’s how Tobi and Eli’s turned out. As you can see, Eli’s mouth is also full of sweets!!

Eliana colouring her wooden angel.

I think the nicest part of the day though was after lunch when the children from the Christmas class went back and collected their houses and brought them to the dining area to share with the rest of the ZOE family and the short term team. We sat around on the ground chatting and enjoying the time together while knocking back the yummy ‘graham cracker’ houses and way too many lollies!! 

Well after all that decorating tonight, the boys sat back, content with their efforts, and ready to watch a Christmas DVD while Dave made dinner and I added the finishing touches to the tree and other parts of the room... I love this time of year!

Stay tuned for our ‘thanksgiving’ adventures and some more blogs about our busy last couple of weeks.

Smiles, Andie x