2025 Faith Leap - Chapter 7: Merry Christmas!

 2025 Faith Leap - Chapter 7: Merry Christmas!

Our Christmas miracle: We found parking right outside of the door of the church building on Christmas Eve when it was pouring rain! But, more importantly, we are grateful for THE Christmas Miracle: Our Savior, Jesus Christ.  We are grateful that, when we seek Him, we find Him - in all the good and bad, big and small, rough and smooth, loud and quiet, turbulent and calm. We love and adore Him.

Highlights

• Lots of sunshine and beach time - our favorite moments have been making boats and finding a Jellyfish
• Christmas Eve Branch party was everything you'd hope for in an extended family holiday party
• The kids were not expecting us to celebrate Christmas with any gifts - they were pleasantly surprised. (And their parents are so relieved the wait for Legos is finally over. We have all missed their world of endless building possibilities).
• CJ is enjoying a traditional Christmas of sorts with family back at home. Thanks to all for taking him in! 

Prayer Requests

• We learned this morning that my brother's friends' home burned down (on Christmas Eve) 💔 Please pray for Fred's family in Oldsmar, Florida.

Details

Christmas Eve Eve: Sunshine and Beach Time

I am a hard mountains>beach person because I am not a fan of sand. While the black sea has some sandy beaches, and has what is closer to sand once you are in the water, most of the beach is rock - so I like it much more than I'd anticipated. On Christmas Eve Eve, we spent our last sunny day for the foreseeable future at the beach for hours - skipping rocks, building boats and barricades, and practicing spear fishing (putting all of the garbage on the beach to good use). And we found a giant Jellyfish! You'll notice the twins are now dawning there swimsuits in the 50 degree weather. The Russian/Georgian grandmothers are probably in a panic.

Christmas Eve

Our Branch hosted a Christmas Eve party! More than half of the people in the Branch do not celebrate Christmas on December 25, so this was an extra kind gesture for those of us who do. The goal was to create a Family Christmas party for all of us away from our family (which is almost everyone). They knocked it out of the park! 

The missionaries led the kids in a reenactment of the Nativity. 

We watched The Christ Child: A Nativity Story. Before, now, I had never appreciated the impact of Church films with minimal dialogue. I have always just viewed them as artistic/stylized. As I watched, I was filled with gratitude for a film that told the story so beautifully with so few words. All of us - despite our array of languages - were able to enjoy and feel the impact of the message of this video because it was communicated so simply.

We had a potluck dinner. Richard tried his hand at Olivye (Russian/Ukrainian Potato Salad) - it was delicious! We were bursting at the seams with nearly 50 people at the activity! 🎉I learned a helpful tip for extending a meal: always have some boxes of instant rice on hand. I also learned to wash everything - including banana peels (not sure if that is a mission thing, or a cultural thing) and that I get in my own head a little too much over how to do things in a different culture. (I tried anticipating how they would want the fruit to be served and learned they would have done it the same way I would have - so now they probably think my way was just a weird American thing when it was just this American being weird.)

We then had a Talent Show unlike anything that would fly at home. It lasted for 2.5 hours, nearly every person participated in some way, and we saw the widest array of talent we have ever seen: from more formal musical numbers (our digital piano was delivered on Christmas Eve Eve (yay!) - so we pulled together "If I Were a Shepherd" in a day) and magic tricks, to animal sounds, speedy shoe tying, hyper-flexibility, and finger counting to 31 on just one hand. President Simonenko could make a living as a circus ring-leader or sports announcer. He and the willingness of our new friends to share any random quirk or skill that came to mind had the whole room wowed and/or laughing the entire time. Miss demonstrated her flexibility to everyone's astonishment.

Back at our Chakvi home, we splurged to carry-on our tradition of watching "The Star" for Christmas Eve. (We've learned that most movies are available here on Amazon Prime - you just have to pay for them.) 

Christmas

On Christmas morning, we took our traditional pic on the stairs (See top of post. We did this when we celebrated before we left home, but I wanted one here too. The kids kindly obliged.) We had warned the kids that Christmas here would be pretty low-key because we'd already done Christmas at home. But I was surprised that they weren't even hopeful that there would be something special for them on Christmas morning. We'd let them choose whatever they wanted at the market for their Christmas breakfast. (They chose Corn Flakes and Kit Kat Cereal 🤷🏻‍♀️😂) And that was honestly all they thought there would be. It wasn't until we started dropping hints while video chatting with CJ around 10am that they looked at the tree. There they found Legos. (I had stashed all of the bags in shoes to get them here.) We are all so grateful that the kids have building toys again! That should help with the boredom just as the rains roll in!

We loved receiving some pictures of what CJ and family are up to across the pond - we were missing him extra fiercely Christmas morning. I sent him "Merry Christmas, Darling" (by the Carpenters) with an invitation to replace every "darling" with his name, and every "I wish I was with you" with "we wish you were with us". I am sure he didn't weep through it like I did.

In an attempt to continue the white elephant gift exchange tradition (while also protecting our funds as best we can), I think we may have started a new tradition: we gave everyone 5 minutes to find anything at random from the house and wrap it (the closest thing we had to wrapping paper was blankets. But that added to the ambiguity of the gift, so it worked well.) We passed each person's gift around and tried to guess what might be inside. Then, on the fly, we made up our own Right/Left passing story ("The Browns LEFT home, and flew ACROSS the ocean, arriving in Georgia RIGHT as the sun was coming up...) until we'd passed gifts around sufficiently to mix things up. The fun was in seeing whose guess was the closest to what was actually wrapped. (No one got to keep the "gifts"). It was a lot of fun!