Christmas

I mentioned in my previous post that we had a former 2nd grade student of mine come to visit us for 5 days.  Since we had church Christmas morning and Melanie had to be at the airport a little after 5:00 pm, we ended up doing our Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve.Justin and Michelle came over and brought scalloped potatoes, homemade rolls, and a Hungarian dessert.  I made a ham, green bean casserole, and a salad.  I’ve never made a green bean casserole here before because you can’t get the fried onion type things that you use in it, but we actually brought some back from the States this time.  We weren’t able to bring much “fun” type stuff back from the States, but I did bring that.  Melanie doesn’t eat pork or red meat, so I made a chicken for her and planned for it to be a meal for us another night.  Plus, I am able to use the carcass to make chicken noodle soup.Joshua is 6 weeks younger than Sienna.  Before too long, they will be running around and playing together.  It looks like he’s playing with her foot even now. :-)

Christmas Day I didn’t want to just have sandwiches for Christmas lunch, so I decided to do raclette, a Swiss meal.  If you don’t know what raclette is, it’s where you have baked potatoes, and melt toppings in the thing you see on the table.  Some typical toppings are black forest ham and raclette cheese.  Raclette cheese is pretty expensive, so we started using cheaper kinds (mostly the main Hungarian one).  I thought raclette would be a fun experience for Melanie before she left.  I heard that a couple of teachers from the school didn’t have plans for Christmas Day, so I invited them to join us.  Since we’ve been gone this fall, I actually had never met one of them, who was a new teacher this year.

We opened gifts in the evening after taking Melanie to the airport.  Ethan and Sienna got a percussion instrument set.Gary got a kick out of the gift certificate that I gave him.  It was for raking the lawn.  We returned from the US with leaves all over the yard, and a former horticulture professor told Gary that it wouldn’t be good for us to leave them on the ground.  With the busyness of Christmas and having company as well as several teaching trips that Gary will have in January, I figured this could be a good gift since Gary won’t really have time to rake the yard anyway.Ethan trying out his new drum.