Lady Expat: A Wonderful Christmas!

We got our Christmas present a few weeks early this year. My husband was offered a job back in the States. We leave Germany in exactly one month! Which means we move out of our house in about 2 weeks. Yikes! There is so much to do! I'm trying to stay calm about everything and not worry too much. Next week we're planning on shipping my car. That will be a little hard going without a car but I'd rather have it in the U.S. sooner than up to the last minute here. It generally takes 5-8 weeks for a car to ship overseas. Thankfully, I can walk to a lot of places in Germany. Although the weather is pretty cold and when it is snowing or is raining, I'm not up for being outside much.

Our last Christmas in Germany was very nice. Christmas Eve we cooked our traditional Christmas meal, beef tenderloin and this year our sides were mashed potatoes and green beans. I made a spinach dip and served it with carrots, tomatoes, and crackers for the appetizer. For dessert we made cream brulee. We invited one of my husband's co-workers over for dinner and had a nice time getting to know him better. All of us, except for Blue Rock, stayed up pretty late talking.

Christmas Day we woke up early. Blue Rock came down stairs and opened the rest of his gifts. We rushed off to church, which starts at 8:30am, and brought some sweet friends of ours home with us after church to eat a Christmas lunch. I mainly heated up Christmas Eve dinner since I knew with church there wouldn't be a lot of time to cook. We also made a pumpkin pie because we knew our friends liked that dessert. I had never had pumpkin pie before and I really liked it. Later that day we made our annual ginger bread house. Blue Rock LOVED eating all the candy we used to decorate it. He has never had that much candy in his life. Of course he didn't have any candy until this past Halloween and he became hooked. Not good. Ha!

We love Christmas and celebrating the birth of Jesus. The last 4 Christmases we have spent in Germany and we will miss this time of year here. However, we are looking forward to returning to the States and spending future holidays with family there. We were hoping it would snow this year on Christmas, but it didn't. On the other hand, we were blessed with some sunshine which was nice and somewhat rare this time of year. Now I'm hoping snow will wait until we're out of our house since some of our furniture will have to be moved via our upstairs balcony and if it snows or is raining it will make it more challenging. Also, I'm more of a summer/spring/fall girl, than a cold, wet, snowy winter girl. I hope you and your family had a wonderful Christmas!