Feliz Navidad!

After literally weeks of pre-Christmas partying, it was finally time for the big day. Christmas can be a kind of rough time here; kids and volunteers miss their families, and without any Tios here, things can be a little tense. There were definitely a few tears shed, but for the most part people got caught up in the festivities and had a good time.

Christmas Eve is the big holiday here, not Christmas Day. We had mass at 4p, then jumped right into the annual Christmas play. Every year, the volunteers put on a play for the kids which is both exciting and horrifying. I'm not big on having a lot of attention drawn to myself, so imagine my excitement when I found out I'd have the lead role :/ I was secretly excited though, since it was always my dream as a kid to be the lead in the play and now I was living it out. I started getting nervous once I realized the play would be semi-improv, so I would have to rely on my loose grasp of Spanish to keep the play making sense, but it went really well! The basic premise was I was Santa and I was trying to discover the real meaning of Christmas. I did interviews with famous Biblical figures as another group of volunteers acted out what we were describing. It was actually pretty informative for me since I realized I only knew parts of the Christmas story, and the acting made it funny for the kids. They really liked it a lot :)

Here I am with my elf/Jose, interviewing an angel/Charlotte. I had a pretty sweet deal aside from all the talking. I got to just sit there the whole time :)

Interviewing Mary

She starts us off by talking about Gabriel's visit and her pregnancy. After telling Joseph, they then depart for Bethlehem. She goes into labor on the way and they need to find shelter, but have a hard time finding anyone to let them in. Here they are seeking "posada"

They finally find a dude who won't let them come into his house, but says they can sleep in his stable. Meanwhile, the three Persian kings see the comet in the sky which means a new king is born. They decide to follow it to see what's going on.

Closer to Bethlehem, shepards are out with their sheep. This isn't a great quality picture, but here are the shepards hanging out around their campfire. After a bit, angels come and tell them that Jesus was born and they need to walk to the stable to greet him

All of the shepards leave to find Baby Jesus except for a drunk one, played expertly by Katie

The devils find the drunk shepard/katie and convince him that Jesus isn't anything special and he should tell the others to turn back

The angels are obviously pretty pissed about that, so they confront the devils. The devils and angels duke it out. This fight was pretty intense. Notice Gabriel/Jack grabbing a piece of firewood to slap someone over the head with

The angels rip the horns off the devils and send them to hell. The angels celebrate their victory

The shepards arrive to visit Jesus

Visiting baby Jesus/Brendy in the stable

At the end I gave a little speech explaining that the reason we give gifts during Christmas is as a symbol of God's gift (Jesus) to the world. Then we all sang Feliz Navidad. The end. :)

Jack and Manolo hanging out after the show

The traditional Christmas food here is tamales. A tamal is a little pile of corn meal paste with red sauce and a little chunk of chicken or meat in it. It's then wrapped up in a corn husk or banana leaf and boiled. I'm not a huge, huge fan of tamales, but it was nice to be doing something traditional and the kids were super happy about them. AND I have to say that the two inch square piece of chicken that was in my tamal is by far the largest peice of meat I've ever gotten from NPH. I was actually quite excited about that.

The biggest "family dinner" I've ever had. There were three big tables like this.

It's custom here to stay up until midnight on Christmas Eve. I told the kids that in the States everyone needs to go to bed early on Christmas Eve. They thought that was wierd.

After dinner we went outside and had a big bonfire with a TON of firecrackers and fireworks. Christmas is the biggest day of the year for firecrackers. You know what's pretty stressful? Having 70 kids crowded around a bonfire as people throw firecrackers into it. Especially if you're the nurse on shift that day :/ Miraculously we only had one injury, and that was a kid who was burned by a sparkler.

I took a lot of pictures of Juan Carlos tonight, but he was being particularly cute. Here he is enjoying the bonfire.

Juan Carlos, Katie and Gustavo. Gustavo can be a bit challenging at times, but I've dealt with way worse when I was at WGA so I like him a lot. For Christmas Jack bought him a Pandora hat. I think it's awesome.

Liz and Jimena having some Christmas cuddle time

Prince Jordy enjoying his sparkler

This Christmas was definitely a nice (though very different) experience. I missed everyone at home, but I was happy with the kids. Also, I was happy because I've been telling myself for weeks that I just needed to survive through Christmas; everything is going to fly by after this! We have a week off, then my friend Dan is coming so we can travel for a week! After that, I help train the new folks and then I'm outta here!! I'm actually starting to get little pangs of sadness about leaving, but for now I'm still much more excited by the prospect of being home!! Hope everyone back in the States had a great holiday!