People often ask me how Christmas is, or what Christmas is like here in Kyiv. I’ve been trying to describe in my head what the emotional feeling is about spending the best holiday of the year in Eastern Europe, and I think I’ve come up with a satisfactory answer. Christmas is like… well it’s a lot like Tuesday.
I can’t really put a finger on it. I’ve tried to make Christmas feel like Christmas. I’ve bent over backwards making the season as Christmasy as possible. I have 211 Christmas songs on my computer in mp3 format that have played over and over. I had a multitude of Christmas parties. I played Santa Claus (aka “Det Moros” twice), once in an orphanage and once in a hospital. I watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “The Year Without a Santa Claus” (starring Heat Miser and Snow Miser. You remember them?) I’m surrounded by people I love and who love me. We’ve exchanged gifts. Steven and I performed a puppet show with the obligatory “true meaning of Christmas” message. But there’s that missing element…
I made my first gingerbread house this year, well, not exactly a house. My friend from Finland invited some of us to come over and take part of this construction project. We were supposed to bring decorations, like mints and gumdrops. But in my quest, I saw the Kinder eggs.
Kinder eggs are hollow chocolate eggs with a plastic yellow yolk inside. The yolk always contains some sort of toy. (they’re cooler in Germany) The eggs usually have little figures in them. So I decided to buy two eggs so that we had someone to live in the house.
Since we hadn’t made a decision on what to build, we decided to design the house around whoever came out of the egg. So I opened the first egg and out came… a robot. The second one was a little mouse praying. So we decided to build a space ship for the robot and a church for the mouse. So altogether it looks like the robot has come from outer space to discover the true meaning of Christmas, where he meets the mouse.
My computer says that the Christmas song I’ve listened to the most is “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” the song recorded by Bing Crosby. I can honestly say the highlight of my Christmas was the 45 minutes I spent on the phone with my sister and the family. We didn’t talk about profound things, I mainly remember Barb Ratter’s sandwich cookies and lots of discussion from Isaiah about his new Buzz Lightyear stuff.
So I guess the missing element of my Christmas can be expressed in three words: Bing, Barb and Buzz. It’s fun to say anyway. Merry Christmas! Bing, Barb, and Buzz!

¶ 9:01 AM

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