christmas

We celebrated Christmas a day early.  Saturday morning M., her daughter, O., and her husband, G., came over for breakfast and presents.  We devoured cheesy scrambled eggs, thick bacon and soft, gooey, Cinnabon-style cinnamon rolls that Joey and M. made from scratch with cappuccino and fresh-squeezed soursop juice.  Bellies full, we moved to the family room to open presents.

M. and O. loved their new outfits from Old Navy, and M. almost cried when she opened her new cookbooks.  She kept saying to G., "Do you know how expensive these are here?  I could open my own restaurant!"  G. was super excited about the movie tickets we bought him since he's never been to a movie before!  They wouldn't stop thanking us and repeating "God bless you."  It was pretty sweet, and truly our pleasure.

Not to be outdone, M. and G. and O. had presents for us too!  They had a dress made for me and a shirt from the same fabric for Joey.  Here we are modeling our new gifts.

I didn't want to post any photos of M., O. and G., just in case, so click here to see the rest of my Christmas photos.

Christmas Eve we went to Mass at the Embassy of the Holy See.  We've been avoiding churches all year because of this, so it felt really special to celebrate Mass for Christmas, even with the very loud, Nigerian baritone belting out carols from the pew behind us.

Sadly, many Nigerians did not share the same privilege on Christmas.  It certainly put a lot in perspective for me, as I moped around the house on Christmas, utterly depressed until I got a very close reminder how truly  lucky I am that the only cross I had to bear on Christmas was celebrating without my family.  It's a damn shame what happened here yesterday, and my heart goes out to all those families who lost loved ones.