Christmas in India!

We had a great time celebrating our first Christmas in India!

Of course we missed our families a ton this time of year, and it was really hard to be away from them when they were still all together celebrating. But we did have a really, really good time with our "family" here.

Christmas Eve we hung out a little bit in the afternoon and then at 5 we met to go drive down the main street in town that they have totally lit up and decorated for Christmas.

I realize those pictures are all terrible, but it's hard to get quality pictures while in a moving car. It was really impressive though! It was also just really fun to drive around blaring all our Christmas music favorites. And it was so funny; people all along the streets were just walking around wearing Santa hats. I don't think Indians realize that people don't even do that in America.

Then we drove back home and had soup waiting for us for dinner (bringing in my family tradition!) and cookies and oreo truffles.

After the kids went to bed we just hung out and chatted, drank coffee, and played a game of WhooNu!

On Christmas morning everyone came over for breakfast at 9:30, and then we opened all of our gifts afterward. We all drew names to do a "Secret Santa" on our team, so we exchanged those gifts and some people also opened gifts that had been sent over by our families with some friends who visited a couple of weeks ago.

Landon and Layla made out like bandits.

People piled ALL of the gifts under our tree! Good thing it was made really awkwardly and had this freakish 2 foot "trunk" before the branches started!

This pile is just Landon & Layla's gifts!

 Landon was excited to get lots of Jake and the Neverland Pirates stuff!

 Layla's favorite gift was the new pair of tennis shoes my mom sent over. They're sparkly purple and leopard print.

 Layla insisted on putting them on as soon as she opened them, and left them on for the remaining 2-3 hours until nap time!

After presents were done, Landon & Layla happily lounged around with snack cups of Goldfish crackers sent over by Kyle's mom! Landon has been on cloud 9 having Goldfish the past several days...it's going to be a sad day around here when the box runs out.

After presents we set to work getting the rest of Christmas dinner ready - chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, cheesy potato casserole, green bean casserole, homemade crescent rolls, and cookies and cake balls for dessert. And I'd like to announce for the record, that for the first time in my life I cooked with mushrooms. I chopped up three mushrooms and sauteed them to add the the homemade cream of mushroom soup base I made in order to make the green bean casserole as authentic as possible. I'm proud. 

After lunch the kids were swiftly put down for naps, and we did our "White Elephant" gift exchange. We didn't do gag gifts because none of us need junk right now in our flats, so we did worthwhile under $10 gifts, but did the whole fun stealing gifts from each other game. 

I came away with 4 very cute journals from a really fun store here, and Kyle came away with the Starbucks mug he bought as one of our gifts to give while he was in Delhi. I guess that shows he liked the gift he contributed!

That afternoon we took it easy - the girls watched White Christmas while the guys played Settlers, and everyone just hung out and had a good time together! 

The next day we all went out to lunch together and then I took the girls to get part of their Christmas presents - pedicures together so we can have pretty feet for the beaches of Thailand! (Which we leave tomorrow for!) This is one of the major perks of India....spa treatments are unbelievably cheap. Pedicures cost about $8, and some of us also got hot oil head massages - they rub hot oil into your hair (which helps since the water/pollution makes our hair disgustingly dry) and just massage your head and neck for about 30 minutes, then they shampoo it out and blow dry your hair. For less than $10. Seriously, perks. 

It was a really fun Christmas! Now we're excited to go ring in the New Year in Thailand! More to come!

Oh, and here are some pictures of the Christmas decorations we hung up! Some were sent over by Kyle's mom and some we bought here.

Belated Merry Christmas from our side of the world to yours!