December | 2014 | Our Journey to Swaziland

It is hard to believe that December is already upon us! Things are busy and it seems time is passing so quickly. It is a little (or maybe a lot) hard to wrap my mind around Christmas in summer, like it will be in Swaziland, but maybe that is for another time.

Now I want to jump back to Thanksgiving and since I am keeping this blog as a “journal” for our family, to post a few pics to remember.

We had a fun Thanksgiving meal with our family and friends. We had about 24 join us for a “potluck” style meal. I asked everyone to bring a specific dish so we could have the thanksgiving necessities covered! It turned out great! We had fried turkey, dressing, gravy, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole (all homemade from our friends garden, even down to the fried onions on top!), fruit salad, mac and cheese, and rolls. Maybe next year we need to include some more veggies? I don’t know, but it was all delicious! And of course we had several kinds of dessert.

As we were planning for this time of fellowship, I struggled because I wanted to do some intentional activities, but I did not know exactly what others would want. We had a mixed group of people and I did not want to weird anyone out. But, I wanted to specifically focus on some meaningful things during a time of feasting with a thankful heart.

A year or so ago we went to a craft market in Durban. We had been looking for a good solution for a christmas tree since our tree was made of books (yeah, we tried that thing you see going around Facebook…hideous!!!) and happened upon a small tree made of metal, wire-ish something. We thought it could be our Christmas tree, but also could be used year round if we wanted to. We got it and a few ornaments and brought it home.

I decided to make this a “thankful tree” for thanksgiving (of course, I got this idea from someone else) and Brad printed off some thankful tags for us to use. We invited our guests to participate with us in giving thanks. It was cute and fun.

Another intentional activity we set-up was a (cutting board) of candles on our thanksgiving table. I wanted a way to remember those special people that were not able to be with us, family far away and those who have passed on. All of us gathering on this Thanksgiving day are in a unique situation living in a foreign land. I’m sure we were all missing many loved ones on this day. Days like this bring those we miss and love and hold dear to the front of our minds! I just wanted to remember and honor those people. As we sat down to eat those that wanted to could light a candle to remember. I liked this. There are those I never want to forget!

All in all we had a fun day. I’m thankful that even though we are far from home we still have people on this side of the world that we can call our friends! And people that know what Thanksgiving is! Although we never found any cranberry sauce (might have to have a do over?) we enjoyed the blessings of the day!