Christmas Highlights

The Christmas decorations are all packed away and so ends another joyous holiday season for our family. Despite the general lack of holiday spirit in Jakarta (since it is not a widely celebrated holiday here), we were able to enjoy a warm and festive Christmas with our Jakarta family.

Here are some of our recent highlights...

A few days before Christmas the kids and I discussed baking a birthday cake for Jesus. The kids decided that they wanted to make a Christmas tree cookie cake. I had remembered seeing one in a holiday baking recipe book once so I thought, "No problem." Well, living in Jakarta made putting the cake together a little more difficult. I had to make my own sugar cookie dough instead of buying the premade Pillsbury roll of dough that you can easily slice and bake in uniform circles. It did not come out quite the same but we improvised. And I also had to make homemade icing instead of buying the ready made in a can. Ours didn't spread as easily. But we did our best with what we had and the kids had fun in the process. And the finished product wasn't so bad either :).

Christmas morning brought lots of fun surprises for the boys. Bicycles and golf clubs were the stars of the show. Along with the golf clubs, Justin and I told the boys that we would take them out to play on a real golf course. So this weekend we are going to go stay a couple nights at a hotel near one of the local golf courses and take the kids out to play. So stay tuned to see how that goes...

The day after Christmas a couple from church came over and we spent the entire day playing games. It was great! It reminded me of the good 'ol days (mostly before we had kids) at Granny's house when we would do the same. We even learned a new card game. I can't wait to teach our family back home.

One other thing I forgot to mention before...

This year Justin got the chance to play Santa at a local orphanage. Our church collected shoeboxes for each child and then put on a Christmas party to pass out the gifts. So Justin suited up for the event. Didn't think you would want to miss seeing Justin as Mr. Claus.

Here's Santa Justin with some others from our church who had come along to help with the delivery.