Fête de Noël

Phew.  And I thought I spent a lot of time in the kitchen preparing for our Thanksgiving Dinner!   

Over the last several weeks we've made countless cookies and meals in preparation for Christmas celebrations.  While I'm ready to have some time away from the kitchen, all of the parties have been really fun - especially our Gingerbread House Party with our classmates!

As we mentioned before, there are a lot of Chinese students at our school.  This means that many of them have never celebrated Christmas before, so the idea of a Christmas party was really exciting.  Jordan and I prepared the gingerbread house frames, mixed the icing, and showed our classmates a few photos of gingerbread houses so that they could bring the candies for decorating.

It was a success!

Can you guess that the house with the hoop (and tank) is Jordan's?

Dianna is an American friend we met at school.  She was such a blessing over the last week as she helped me bake dozens and dozens of cookies and prepare for our Gingerbread House Party!

Dianna's house included a fire pit and Nativity Scene.

6 Chinese, 4 Americans, 1 Canadian. 

We primarily spoke in French, but with 2 of Dianna's friends just visiting and not knowing any French, English and Chinese were certainly in the mix!

Everyone seemed to have a really great time and stayed for hours, allowing us to get to know our classmates better and even share about the significance of Christmas - God's gift of forgiveness through His Son, Jesus.