Christmas Parties

Everywhere we look we see the signs of Christmas here in Romania. Lights and decorations are up all over town, stores and vendors have stocked up on holiday items, and we've heard carolers in a subway station and in our apartment building. It is a fun time and it is celebrated much the same here as it is at home. This is also a time filled with lots of hustle and bustle making it is easy to lose focus of the real reason for the season: the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Since the focus of our lives is to glorify God we felt privileged to help with some Christmas parties that put the focus of the season where it should be, on Jesus.

We had a great time serving along with our H2H family. We started the party's out by telling the story of Jesus' birth. Then we had the kids guess who each of us was in the story by asking questions about the story.

We played a word scramble game and then a candy game that taught that it is better to give than to receive, although some of the kids didn't really agree with that :-) We also had a snowball fight with paper snowballs.

We helped the older kids to make gingerbread houses. They really enjoyed this activity and especially enjoyed eating the houses when they were done building them.

It is always great to see the kids smiling like this, it is wonderful to be involved in their lives and to brighten up their lives.

Later in the week we drove to Rosiori and Alexandria where there are separate schools for boys and girls. We watched the boys Christmas program and later handed out gift bags to them for Christmas.

At Alexandria the girls were really excited and overjoyed to receive presents from us. It is a big deal for them to have presents because they have so few possessions of their own.

One more thing that happened that had nothing to do with Christmas was that Mark had an accident with the computer. While plugging the computer in it slipped out of his had and the screen hit the corner of the coffee table. Ouch. Mark ordered a new screen and will try to replace it on his own, because to have it repaired by Apple would cost the same as the entire computer. Thankfully we're still able to use the computer, we just can't see very much.