Celebrating the Winter Holiday in Turkey

(Joni) As I mentioned in my previous post, the vast majority of Turks don't celebrate Christmas. However, many of them do celebrate the New Year, and they do it very similarly to the way Americans celebrate Christmas - tree with lights and decorations, giving presents, even Santa (Noel Baba, which means Father Christmas in Turkish) comes on New Year's Eve here! This is why I said Winter Holiday in my post title... Even though in our house, we were very much celebrating Christmas, a lot of the lights/decorations/festivities we are seeing around us are because of New Year!

Karum Mall in the town center has some beautiful star/snowflake decorations.

Since we believe in celebrating Christmas as the birth of Christ and not just a winter holiday, we tried to maintain our family traditions that would help us keep that in mind. So we did our Advent Tree (where we read a short Bible story and put up an ornament every day of December) again this year, and we enjoyed that a lot!

Elias next to our tree in his Phineas & Ferb Christmas jammies that Grandma & Grandpa brought when they visited in the Fall. It's Christmas Eve, so there's only one spot left at the top of the tree for the Christmas Day ornament!

We also threw our own little birthday party for Jesus on Christmas Day, which I unfortunately didn't take any pictures of. But we had a yummy dinner and birthday cake!

Since the postal system between the US and Turkey is expensive and unreliable, rather than mailing gifts to us, our family just gave us money and we did our own shopping for gifts... Elias got so many trains - he's a happy camper! We also had one gift that Grandma & Grandpa had brought when they were here, and it had been sitting in my closet since September! So that was fun for Elias to finally open it!

It was the Toy Story movie and some Toy Story figures. He loved them!

Since Elias had so many days off school, I tried to fill them with fun Christmas-y things like watching Christmas movies (His favorite is the old claymation Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer!) and making Christmas cookies!

My favorite Christmas cookies - peanut butter blossoms! Elias liked the melted Kisses more than the cookie part - he definitely comes by his love of chocolate honestly. :)

We were also able to Skype with our families on Christmas, which was a blessing. Thanks to modern technology, we were able to watch all of them open the Turkish gifts we had sent, which was so much fun! :) So we had a nice first Christmas in Turkey, and we get to keep celebrating since the holiday the Turks are celebrating is yet to come! We're looking forward to seeing how they celebrate the New Year!