Christmas

I hope that you all had a very Merry Christmas this year. As Christmas was approaching our church was preparing for the island wide Christmas event. All three of the churches on island come together for a community church service on the Sunday before Christmas. Each church prepares either songs or dances and some do both. Our church does both. So for the week before this service we had practice every evening to prepare for this.  Our performance was on Sunday. The church service usually last about 1-2 hours and takes place later in the afternoon. Which is about the hottest time of day. Since I was participating I had to sit with the choir. The choir squishes into the front rows of the church. Lusi always used to complain to me about it being so hot up there and I thought he was just exaggerating a little. Jokes on me. I was dripping sweat about five minutes into the service. It is very very hot sitting with the choir. I felt so gross by the end of the service. After the service was complete we all got cake, cinnamon rolls, and koko rice.

            On Christmas Eve the church service does not begin until around 10 p.m. interesting for me I have never been to service so late in the night. I was actually surprised by how many people were in the church for this service. Now for me this is really late for me to stay up. Since moving here it is a miracle if I stay up past 10:00 p.m. Granted I get up really early but I think it does with the fact it gets dark early here and I think that its way later than it actually is. The Christmas Eve service was nice and I went straight to bed afterwards.

            On Christmas Day our church held a BBQ for the youth. The day was filled with Christmas music, volleyball, tetherball, and a dance competition. My favorite part of the day was being able to see my students since I don’t see them because of school. A lot of them would come and sit and talk to me about the presents they got. One boy came running up to me Miss Abby, Miss Abby, I got a swimming pool from my mom. He had the biggest smile on his face. He was so excited. He still is talking to me about it when I see him. After eating our meal we all headed to the ocean to go swimming for the afternoon. Not often do Samoans want to go swimming in the middle of the day. I was pretty excited about it. After spending the day swimming and eating I went home and watched movies to end the Christmas!

With Love,

Abby