In a culture with no Thanksgiving to celebrate in November, the celebration of Christmas is already in full swing. We've witnessed some amazing Christmas themed fireworks and seen some beautiful Christmas displays already. At first we were ambivalent about celebrating Thanksgiving because it seemed sort of like going backwards. Do we really need turkey? As it turns out, we will be out of town Thursday anyway (more about that in a minute) so we were even less inclined to celebrate since we won't be home. Interestingly, since there are a lot of gringos in the city, local merchants have figured out they can sell frozen butterballs, cranberry sauce, Stove Top, and canned pumpkin to a captive audience with little competition. Said Butterballs are quite expensive, however, which was another discouragement. But then, this week as I thought about the last year of our lives, my thoughts were how could we NOT celebrate Thanksgiving, whether we had turkey or not? Everything we have in our lives right now is just pure blessing. We definitely needed to take a time out and return some thanks in a specific way. In the end, I found a small budget friendly turkey breast, and today for Sunday dinner we enjoyed a few of our Thanksgiving favorites. We invited a couple of friends, and we prayed and ate and talked through a quiet afternoon. We even watched a little football this evening which seems fitting for Thanksgiving as well.
Our Thanksgiving ended up as kind of a holiday mash up as we decided to get a Christmas tree today. We went to Novex (our Lowe's like store) and bought a base model slightly better than Charlie Brown's and a few inexpensive decorations. So decorating and Christmas music accompanied our meager feast. Even though the weather hasn't changed much here and our Ohio brains aren't sure it's November, today helped put us all in holiday spirits.
For our first Thanksgiving outside the States, we will be on the road. I used to hear missionaries talk about "visa trips," and thought it seemed kind of inappropriate. Were they all taking vacations on credit cards? But now in my cultural education I have learned what a visa trip is. Every 180 days, we have to leave the country to renew our Guatemalan visas to be in the country. Eventually we will apply for residency which will alleviate this requirement. Long story short, if we're not planning a trip to the States, our closest choices are Mexico and Belize. So, we will be heading out Thursday morning to spend a few required nights out of the country in Belize. In know, poor us, we have to go check out the Caribbean. And for those of you who are familiar with our history of road trips in Guatemala, you will be relieved to hear that a Guatemalan friend who is a mechanic is driving us. So, here's wishing a Happy Thanksgiving to all our friends and family, whether you're in Cincinnati or at the big parade in New York. We thank God for you all and how you've touched our lives. We thank you for all your love and support that sustain us here. Thank you to amazing friends here in Guatemala where after only six months we have awesome friends to take care of our dog, house, church, or anything else that needs taking care of. We love you all! And if you see a picture of us on the beach, we are not vacationing on our visa, but getting our 90 day visas stamped.
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