My celebrations started Wednesday. One of the girls in my small group had mentioned a few weeks back that she wanted to cook me dinner so that I wouldn't be sad about Thanksgiving (love her) and that I could bring a few friends along. So on Wednesday I showed up with Courtney, Pieter, and Tricia not really knowing what to expect. We walked in and I was immediately surrounded by the smells of Thanksgiving- she along with some of the rest of our small group had made everything that goes along with a typical Thanksgiving dinner, including turkey (she even looked up how to make sweet potato casserole because someone told her that was what all Americans ate for Thanksgiving). If that wasn't enough, she told us to go upstairs and wait for dinner to be ready and as we walked upstairs I started to see that they had decorated the entire house with Thanksgiving decorations. We walked into the dining room and they had found Thanksgiving napkins and table settings (her mom ordered them off the internet) and filled the whole room with candles. It almost made me cry. It was so beautiful and such an amazing expression of love that I didn't even know how to respond. We all sat down to dinner and had wonderful conversation where I filled them in on what Thanksgiving means to me and then we all went around and said what we were thankful for. She even rented It's A Wonderful Life and we all ate dessert, drank tea, and watched it and talked for hours. It was perfect.
The next day I woke up a little sad and to be honest my morning and afternoon was pretty sad (I did laundry, went to class, and mostly felt sorry for myself because I wasn't with my family). But around 2 Courtney, Genifer, and I went to Tescos (grocery store) to prepare for a massive Thanksgiving dinner (yes, I cooked?!). I'm pretty sure we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into whatsoever. We left the store at 4 with 70 pounds worth of food (oh ya, you get to double that to change it to dollars) and started delegating cooking duties. Because Genifer is the only one who can actually cook (who am I kidding?) she took over cooking the 4 chickens (no turkey) and the cranberry sauce while Courtney and I handled the mashed potatoes (from scratch!), fruit salad, stuffing, corn, peas, green beans, gravy, and desserts. Good thing dinner didn't start till 8:30 :) Pieter came over to help and we actually finished with very few mishaps, although I did smash a glass bottle of mayonnaise and then cut open my finger... but all in all, not a lot of difficulties. It was actually kind of funny because we had two kitchens operating and we would send Pieter back and forth from our two flats delivering status reports :) Taking a page out of my small group's book, we set up candles everywhere, got a tablecloth, and I added some yellow roses. It actually looked really nice (pictures should be going up on facebook soon). It was totally worth it when our Belgian and German guests arrived (Lien, Elaine, Markus, and Felix), they were so excited about their first Thanksgiving! We then stuffed our faces for what seemed like forever (I silently engaged in an eating competition with the two 6 foot 5 German guys- they won) and then ate dessert while playing scrabble. Sadly, the only team without native speakers beat all of us in English scrabble- talk about pathetic. Although it was still really difficult to skype my family and realize that I wasn't there, it was fun. Isn't it wonderful how God provides in ways that you least expect Him to?
The next day we all rolled out of bed (or at least I did) around 1 and met up to eat leftovers. We ate for a little while and put a dint in the food then did Thanksgiving crafts (they wouldn't do them that night because they were "too cool") while watching this hilarious movie from the 70s- check it out- Jack the Giant Killer, oh ya it is as great as the name sounds. Then Friday night we all went into Coleraine to see the Christmas tree lighting. There was a parade and children's choirs and fireworks. It was adorable and a great start to the Christmas season. I can't wait to come home and celebrate Jesus's birth with ya'll.
Happy holidays!
