Christmas in Cairo

Because I was so homesick in October I was nervous about how December would feel. When Mark and I lived here before it didn't feel like Christmas at all except in our apartment.  I was so surprised at how festive New Cairo is.  There are decorations everywhere and even our school was all decked out.  I read quite a few articles about where to find the best Christmas displays and was so impressed with what we saw.  We drove over to Sheik Ziad near 6th of October one night (passing by the Giza Pyramids as we did - so crazy we live somewhere that that is a normal thing to do) and loved seeing their beautiful displays.  The mall by our house had awesome outdoor decorations as well. It was a festive month and I am so grateful it went so much better than October.  The weather helped a ton as well.  We even felt chilled at times and needed to wear sweaters and jackets. 

On the drive to Sheik Zaid

We chose a burger place (Good Eatery) to eat dinner in Sheik Ziad and were so surprised when we saw they had a peppermint milkshake on the menu!  It wasn't quite like what you would get at home but we applaud them for trying and the milkshakes were the best ones we have had here.  They were thick and creamy. 

Hydeout, New Cairo.  About 30 minutes from our house there is a large housing development and this year they hosted a cute Christmas town so we went to check it out one night.  There was a carousel, food trucks, carnival games, and beautiful displays. 

I had read online that they would have roller skating available and was so excited to try it out.  Sadly it was a very miniature rink but Lydia had fun skating around

 

AIS.  Our school had amazing decorations!  It was so fun to walk around the halls.  One day I went on a quick walk around the school and counted 11 Christmas trees.  It was definitely not this festive when I worked there before.  Each year AIS hosts a food drive where students donate food to give to all the workers at school. We took Jared and Lydia to a grocery store nearby and gave them each 150 Egyptian pounds to spend on food for the food drive. They were pretty reluctant to go and ended up having a fun time choosing the food and budgeting how much they could get with their money.  I love that our school has a built in service opportunity. 

At the beginning of the month I sat down and picked 25 Christmas activities and got all the supplies ready.  They ranged from coloring pages and word scrambles to a Christmas Trivia Kahoot and Youtube playlists of neighborhood Christmas lights displays and the all time best Christmas commercials.  Our school library has a decent supply of Christmas books and the librarian let me check out as many as I wanted.  We successfully did our Names of Christ Advent every night, reading the descriptions by candlelight which made it more special. We watched the 2021 Witness's of Christ Concert the church hosted and the First Presidency Christmas Devotional.  We decided to watch one talk from the devotional a night the week leading up to Christmas which worked really well. At the beginning of the month we spent an evening in Maadi attending a local church's live nativity.  They have been hosting this nativity for 70 years, Mark and I attended it when we lived here previously.  It was a much smaller scale due to COVID but helped set the right spirit for the month. 

I love how festive our apartment was.  I brought some things with me but the teachers who lived here before us really loved Christmas so when we bought all their stuff we got some great Christmas decor which was awesome. 

Maadi Community Church Nativity 

Christmas traditions Cairo edition.

With a little extra planning we were able to do most of our Christmas traditions here.  It is well documented that most things can be done here you just have to add 2-4 more steps so that is what we did.  I was really glad we were able to do our traditions, they definitely made it feel like home. Both Jared and Lydia said Christmas in Cairo was about the same as Christmas at home, that they had a great weekend which made me feel really happy and accomplished.  There are plenty of hard things here but we are figuring it out! 

Ice cream cone trees, Christmas tree waffles, Christmas baking and Christmas caroling.

We had such a fun time caroling.  We picked three families to visit, got our cookie plates together, made our hot chocolate and ordered an Uber.  Mark asked the Uber driver if he wouldn't mind doing more than one stop which made it easier to get to all the different houses. The families we visited were really happy, they were all so surprised it was great. The last one we visited took this fun picture of us. 

We missed handing out the "Best Christmas Lights Award" this year but drinking hot chocolate while watching awesome light displays on our TV worked well enough. The best Christmas commercials were fun and heartwarming to watch. We tried to guess what the commercials were for and were rarely successful.  We watched Food Network's Christmas cookie challenge and I made a Christmas trivia Kahoot which Jared and Lydia loved.  It was great to have these simple activities to make the month feel special.  And we are all thrilled to be on Winter break especially Lydia! 

Christmas Eve 

Since Christmas Eve was a Friday we started the day with church.  We decided to attend the Nile River Branch which is all in Arabic and then attend our own branch after.  We figured both Sacrament meetings would have a special Christmas program and they were both really nice.  That afternoon I did a lot of food prep because we were having our friends from school, the Karsies over for Christmas Eve dinner. We went to the special grocery store that sells ham in Heliopolis last week and got a Christmas ham and it turned out great.  We ate dinner and watched the special Christmas episode of The Chosen together. It was nice to visit with them.  They are easy to get along with and we always enjoy hanging out with them.  Before bed Jared and Lydia exchanged their sibling gift and then we sent a few of Marco Polos to people at home singing them Christmas Carols. It was really fun and a great way to end the evening. Before going to bed Mark and I filled the stockings and wrote out the scavenger hunt clues for the next day. 

Christmas Day

We told Jared and Lydia to meet us in our room at 7:45 so we could watch the Nativity together as we do each year.  Lydia was up at 6:00 and Jared woke up at 7:30.  I got up around 7:00 to make orange rolls since Pillsbury Orange Rolls are not available here. I found a copycat recipe that actually turned out to be very similar to the Pillsbury rolls.  I have a different recipe for orange rolls that I make at Easter which are just like orange cinnamon rolls but these were much more similar to the Pillsbury ones which was great.  Susanna and I were exchanging some Marco Polo's and she ended up having to make orange rolls from scratch too because all the stores near her were out when she went to buy some.  We also both made egg, cheese and sausage casseroles! It was fun to chat with her and funny that we were doing the same things. 

After the nativity we came downstairs to open stockings and presents.  Once that was done we finished getting breakfast ready, ate, and then Jared and Lydia played with some of their new presents.  My favorite presents was a pair of roller skates.  I love roller skating so much and after we attended the Christmas festival with the miniature rink I was thinking about where we could skate and it occurred to me that we could totally skate at our school!  We could try the gym, the canteen or the hallways.  I got in touch with a friend from school who has lived here a long time to see if she had recommendations on where to get skates and she actually had two pairs of rollerblades her kids had outgrown and offered them to Jared and Lydia. It was such a fun surprise. Once they had skates I was pretty jealous so I convinced Mark to go to one store with me and they had roller skates!  It was a Christmas miracle.  I am so happy to have my own skates again and have an active activity to do with Jared and Lydia.  I have missed biking, kayaking and hiking so much since we got here!

Around noon Jared and Lydia asked about the scavenger hunt so we did that together.  It was so fun.  This is one of our favorite traditions and it was fun to have a new place to hide the present in and come up with clues. We did not mean to make it super challenging for Jared but he struggled with quite a few of the clues.  It was really fun. 

Finding the first clue hidden in the tree. This also took him longer than expected. It was great! 

Laser tag.  Jared has wanted a set for a long time and lucky for us a family in our ward who works with the foreign service and gets mail from the US offered to order Christmas presents for us!  We got Jared Legos and this set and he was a happy kid. We found all of Lydia's presents here but Jared really wanted Legos and they are so expensive/hard to come by here.  We hope this will entice Jared to have friends over here.  He always comments that their houses are much more fun than ours and he is not wrong but we would like to return the favor and have them over here too. 

Stuffed animals have been very important to Lydia since we got here.  She had to leave most of hers at home in our attic in Virginia and she misses them.  She was very happy to receive this one. So cute! 

After the scavenger hunt we decorated some more cookies and then took them over to the security guards at school.  Normally we take treats to the fire station/ER but we weren't quite how that would work here so when a friend suggested taking treats to the guards I knew it was a great option for us. Jared was pretty grumpy to help decorate them and then as usual with service had a great time delivering them to people.  They seemed very surprised and happy to receive them.  After we dropped those off we went to the gym to roller skate/blade and play basketball.  Mark has been trying to get us to the school more to use the facilities and it has been hard to be motivated to go.  It will be a goal for the New Year to use the school facilities more and I know these skates will help.  They are heating the pool as well so we need to go swim too. 

We finished the day with leftovers from last night and then watched a Christmas movie.  It was a really lovely weekend.  It was really a blessing to have such a fun month and to not just feel really homesick.  We briefly toyed with the idea of going home for Christmas once our Eastern Europe trip got cancelled but it was just easier to stay here and in the end it worked out really nicely.  We were glad to be together to celebrate such a special time of year.