A Kiwi Christmas

We celebrated Christmas Eve here in Wellington by making Christmas cookies! Adam, one of our flatmates, had never celebrated Christmas before so we tried to share some of our traditions. Adam became a Christian a little over a year ago, and went home to China for holiday last year. And, growing up in China, they obviously didn't celebrate Christmas. Soooo, we tried to do the best we could to share it with him.

After making Christmas cookies, we watching several of the Home Alone movies, and then went to a midnight Christmas Eve service at the local Anglican church. It was fun to see a traditional kiwi service, and hear the carols with a nice accent :)

Christmas Eve was super windy! But when we woke up Christmas day it was actually a beautiful day! We haven't had many since we arrived, but how wonderful that it was nice on Christmas day.

We spent Christmas day with another American family we've met here. I think I'm mentioned the Moore's before, but they moved here about a year ago from Texas to work with international students. They invited any students over that didn't have family to celebrate with, and they invited us as well. The students were from Thailand, China, Japan, France, and a few others. The Moore's had a bar-b-que, which is a very kiwi thing to do apparently. Afterwards, Mark Moore sat everyone down and read the Christmas story from Luke. He asked if anyone had never heard the story before, and several of the students raised their hands. It was so neat to see how the Moore's take students into their home and share Christ with them in such a loving way.

We then headed to the beach for a little bit. Here are a bunch of the students making their way across the beach.

Sarah is one of our uni students involved with StudentLife. Her parents and Mark and Sandy Moore. She is awesome, and I'm excited to get to spend more time with her this year!

I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas!