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!

Special Delivery: Present from New School

(Joni) This morning we had an unexpected knock on the door. I don't usually answer the door when Justin isn't home, because I probably won't have the language to talk to the person on the other side. However, through the peephole I could see this was a deliveryman with a small box, so I opened the door. It was a small present addressed to Elias, and the crest on the envelope was from his new English school, which he will start on Thursday!

Elias was VERY excited to get a present, and he eagerly opened it up!

It was a cute inflatable penguin that you put water in the bottom section so when you hit it it stands back up! There was also a sweet note from the principal saying how much they were looking forward to having him in their school this year.

What's really funny is Justin had found a toy like this for Elias last week, so he already had a tiger. Now his tiger has a friend!

Elias loves them both and is excited to have them "play" together. In celebration of his new penguin friend, we put in the Go, Diego, Go! episode about Pepito the Emperor Penguin, and Elias put his two friends on the couch with him to watch the episode together!

I thought that was such a sweet gesture from his new school, and we're looking forward to him going there and benefiting from their care!