Christmas Day 2009

Christmas fell on a Friday this year, which meant that we had church in the morning, but only for an hour and at 10:30 instead of 9:30.

Andrew made us get up and open presents before he left for choir practice in spite of my warning of temper tantrums and tears. Rachel had quite the haul of gifts waiting for her under the tree and I knew that parting with any of them would unleash her crazy side.

I was right. But we won’t rub that in Andrew’s face or anything.

Miriam got to open her stocking first. Inside was pretty much nothing—a washcloth (that I put in Andrew’s stocking in 2007 and 2008) and a My Little Pony that the Lewises gave to us before they left. She was still excited about it. As was Rachel, who declared,

“I want one of those, too!”

Christmas Eve 2009

For a year and a half now we’ve driven past and marveled at what we’ve nicknamed “The Easter Egg Mosque.” It looks like a pysanka (писанка )—a Ukrainian Easter egg—especially at night when it’s all lit up. I’m not even kidding.

See for yourself.

Mosque:

Pysanky:

Bad things now come in more than threes

Two days before Christmas we came home from Luxor and checked our email only to find that we had been bombarded with a slew of emails from Mint.com informing us that we had a series of overdraft charges and ATM fees, mainly from Hallandale, Florida.

Merry Christmas to us.

That’s because you’re crazy.

When I was a child I tried to treat all my toys—old and new—equally. I can still recall many names of my dolls: Faline, Thomas, and Pixie, to name a few. I had a pair of pandas named Tia and Tony. I had a teddy bear named after my sister Kelli. And I named my tricycle Elisabeth in honour of one of my cousins.

Yup. I named just about everything.

Banana Island (December 22)

Finally, a sleep in day! The hotel breakfast closed at 10:00 AM, so everyone was up before then so that they could have breakfast. Everyone except for me and Miriam, that is.

We slept through breakfast.

Everyone came up from breakfast, lazed around, packed up their rooms for check-out and moved their things into our room (which we kept until 9:00 PM) and then got ready to go to lunch.

Miriam and I took a nap instead.

Worst thing to happen to archeology since Indiana Jones (December 21)

Before leaving Dendera for good we decided to have a little fun.

With, I might add, blessings from and pleasure for the guards who were egging us on a bit for some of these pictures.

Jacob pretended to be a sphinx…

Dendera (December 21)

Not quite as early as Sunday we loaded back into the van and headed out of Luxor, past the city of Qena, to the temple of Dendera.

I loved seeing all the little villages along the canals. It was very rural—the houses all had farm animals in the front and little shelters made out of grass and mud.

Luxor West Bank (December 20)

Our day started bright and early, at least for us. We loaded into the van at 8:00 AM to be taken across the Nile to the West Bank. Our driver was a happy, obliging fellow which meant that he cheerfully drove us to each destination we asked him to without pressuring us to hurry it up. Last time our driver was not so nice.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

There’s nothing quite like distributing your Christmas letter on Christmas Eve. Talk about waiting until the midnight hour…

In my defense, I finished writing the actual text long ago and was just waiting for Andrew to agree on a time and place to take a family picture. The last few weeks of the semester were just too crazy, though, and when classes finally ended on the 15th Andrew only had two short days to finish up his final projects before his dad and brother arrived on the 17th. He finished up his last paper on the 18th and emailed it to his professor from our hotel in Luxor.

So that’s where we ended up taking our family pictures. And although we were intending to send this out from Luxor, we didn’t end up doing it until today because some genius (me) forgot to put the draft of the poem on the laptop we took with us to Luxor.

We caught cold in Luxor, so I slept in all morning with Miriam and then spent quite a bit of the afternoon making those snowflakes for our newsletter in Photoshop—it was just as fun as cutting them out with scissors! Then this evening Rachel, Miriam, and I (the sickies) stayed home and watched The Muppet Christmas Carol while Andrew took his parents and Jacob out to see the Tanoura Sufi dancers downtown. That was our Christmas Adam.

Now it’s the wee hours of Christmas Eve and I’m barely getting our newsletter up on the blog. I wonder if we’ll ever get around to emailing it out this year…

Luxor East Bank (December 19)

Our first day in Luxor was bust—we flew down after church on Friday, which was wonderful because the flight took less than an hour and was so much more pleasant than, say, an all-night train ride. Rachel was so excited to fly she could hardly contain herself but behaved wonderfully on the plane. Miriam slept.

We braced ourselves to face the gauntlet of taxi cab drivers circling around outside