Update: Wednesday 26 Dec

Hi!

Today I want to tell you about my Christmas.

I mean, really there isn't much to tell. But I had a lot of fun anyway so here you have it.

So I guess at midnight on Christmas eve (or I suppose then that is very early Christmas morning), it is Dutch tradition (for those who are still religious) to go to midnight mass, and then go home and have breakfast (yes, at one or two in the morning) and open gifts. I was not there for that part, though Tessa's mom thought I would be. I wasn't. It's okay. I got Tessa's house at about half past noon Christmas day, we would have sat around and watched movies but Tessa and I had planned to go to the cinema. We went and saw a movie in Dutch, I was so proud of how much I understood. I'm making progress. Then we went back to Tessa's house, and we had dinner. Just me, Tessa, her sister and her parents. Nothing fancy, it was still a good dinner though.

After dinner, we played Monopoly and ate Dutch apple pie. You know I hate Monopoly, but I was trying to be a good sport. When Tessa's sister said let's play Monopoly and Tessa said "no, no, no, no, no!" I said sure. So we played Monopoly. In Dutch, of course. It wasn't too bad, but when Tessa was the first to run out of money, I lost interest in the game and it was harder for me to pay attention to the amounts of money they were demanding from me, so I did my best to also run out of money so I could join Tessa. Tessa who was cooking appelflappen and peerflappen. They are… these little pastries… Like this: flat sheet of dough, put apples/pears in the middle, fold it in half so it is a triangle stuffed with apples/pears, press the edges with forks. Bake. They puffed up nice and pretty. The pears were an experiment. Usually they only make them with apples.

This morning, Second Christmas day, was the more extended-family Christmas day. Yes, all Dutch people celebrate two Christmas days. The 25th and the 26th. We watched movies on TV all day. Tessa told me they do that every Christmas. Her family started arriving around three in the afternoon. I had met her grandmother before, but couldn't remember if I had met any of the others. Either way, every one of them came in and gave me an enormous hug. I may have met them at Tessa's graduation party, I don't know. I was drowning that day. I had only been in the country for 2 weeks and my ears were completely untrained to Dutch.

Probably around four or five, we all got ready to sit down to dinner. The fun part was that the electricity kept blowing. On the second Christmas day, they do this thing with a special kind of grill that sits in the middle of the table, and then a bunch of raw meats that you can cook and eat yourself throughout the meal. It was really cool. The problem was that there were 10 of us, so we had one traditional grill thing and two of those kind of grills that have a grill lid that—well I'm not very good at describing any of this. Here is a link to the one grill (I managed to find the exact grill for that one) and the others were kind of like this, except probably bigger and… nicer. Anyway, all three of those were plugged in and the power kept going out so we turned off everything except for one small light and the grills and ate mostly by candlelight. It was pretty cool.

Aside from the raw meats they had made salad and fries and boiled potatoes and some other things that didn't interest me like cabbage and such. And they had bread. I always like bread. I just ate a lot of meat. You know what, I don't buy meat. If I want to eat a big meal of meats that I can cook myself on the spot, then leave me be and let me eat. So… beef, chicken, these skewers (which I first thought were chicken but when I cooked one and tried it, the texture was more like pork so basically I have no idea what those were), little sausages, and some kind of breaded meat patties that were probably like Dutch kroketten or something similar. I really have no idea. I just know that I ate way too much. And in the end, Tessa's aunt and I took care of cooking the rest of the beef that was left over so that it could go in the fridge, and when we stacked it all on the tray after it was cooked I kept sneaking pieces of that. It was all pretty good. Horribly indulgent. But good.

Then, of course, ice cream for dessert. Ice cream and pudding and lots of whipped cream because whipped cream is good.

Tessa's grandmother sat next to me at dinner and she doesn't speak any English. She kept asking me all of these questions, the first one being (roughly) can you understand much of what people are saying? She is a very nice lady.

I was not expecting gifts, because I just wanted to go for the company and the experience. But Tessa's parents brought me some really delicious chocolate from Belgium, and Tessa bought me some really smelly bath set.

All in all, it was really nice and I'm very thankful that they allowed me to join them for Christmas.

It was also really nice to realize how much I could really understand of everything they were saying over the last two days. It makes me feel kind of really proud. Now if only I wasn't too chicken to ever respond to anyone in Dutch… I have to do some studying for my Dutch exam the second week of January anyway, maybe I'll learn a little something and stop being so chicken. Also, going to the movies so often really helps me too. Every movie has Dutch subtitles. Yet another opportunity to learn. I'll get there some day.

Okay, I lied. There was a lot to tell.