The first of our Christmas festivities was going to a Christmas village (julebyen) in a town called Egersund. A couple that lives near us offered to take us there and we were grateful they did. It was a cute market with rows of homemade Christmas ornaments, winter gear, and lots of food.
Julenissen (Santa Claus) was also there. And I have to say, I really like how Santa interacts with the kids here. Instead of waiting in a long line to sit on his lap, which probably costs money and often terrifies the young children, there is just a group around him and he shakes the child's hand and gives them some sort of treat, and then you're off to the next thing.
Lily didn't seem too excited about meeting Santa at the time, but she talked about the heart sucker he gave her for a long time afterwards.
I also tried risgrøt for the first time. It is eaten year-round, but is especially a Christmas food. Traditionally, families eat risgrøt for breakfast on Christmas Eve and then add cream to the leftovers (and other spices) to make riskrem for after dinner. They add an almond to the pot and whoever finds the almond in their bowl gets a prize. Kind of fun.
Lily also met Julenissen at barnehage, who again shook all the children's hands and handed out raisins and clementines. Side note: One kind of creepy thing (to us anyway, ha ha) is the traditional mask that Julenissen sometimes wears. You can see it in this picture. I guess instead of just a fake beard, they put on a full mask?
What I really did miss this Christmas was all our Christmas decorations. I really wanted to make it feel like Christmas in here so we had to get creative. I saw the muffin tin idea on Pinterest, so I just accumulated what we had around here, bought some chocolate, and made a really simple advent calendar. It served it's purpose! I was excited to have a decoration up. But then my friend was SO kind and let me borrow decorations she wasn't using and then we had plenty to decorate our whole front room!
I also took a huge piece of paper from her one day and Barrett bought a strand of Christmas lights and we started to make a paper Christmas tree. It sounds silly, but it was surprisingly expensive to buy a small Christmas tree and then even more to put it in a stand and buy decorations.... There's a lot you're not willing to put money into when your situation in a location is temporary. But Barrett seriously made our tree look awesome!
I found another idea on Pinterest that involved hanging fishing wire with cotton balls strung on different lengths of the wire to make it look like snow.
And we ended up with our Christmas tree corner. We added our small pile of presents and then our Christmas season finally felt complete.
Lily had fun watching us, and I felt slightly sad because she is at a fun age to start helping with hanging ornaments, but that's okay. Next year. She had fun reminding us to turn on the Christmas lights everyday and looking at all the presents.
In Norway, they celebrate most of their traditions (including opening presents) on Christmas Eve and the buses shut down for several days. So we decided to walk around city center on the 23rd. First we walked around their small pepperkakerbyen (gingerbread house village).
Our bishop's wife always has an amazing house there. In fact, she won first place a few years ago for making the Salt Lake Temple out of gingerbread. If you google it you can see the KSL article about it.
All of the streets in the city center are lined with lights.
But there is one in particular called the color street that has a lot more lights and a lot more color (obviously).
We weren't able to go the lighting of the tree, but this big tree in the middle is lit up at the beginning of December.
Lights around the central lake.
Christmas Eve and Christmas was A LOT slower and more quiet than we are used to. We were a little homesick, but it was nice too to celebrate with just our family. Since we were on our own we decided to make our own "traditional" American dinner on Christmas Eve.
Prepping our honey-baked ham.
Finished product.
Lion House rolls,
au gratin potatoes, green beans, and ham took most of our day preparing and made it feel a little more like home. We also made homemade eggnog a few days later, but I didn't take a picture. Barrett was really missing his eggnog :)
Our primary president shared a tradition their family does for Christmas and I loved the idea! So we added it to our Christmas Eve traditions. We try to focus on the real reason of Christmas on Christmas Eve and do what we can to talk about Christ and his birth so the tradition fit right in. Starting on the December 1st, as our gift to Christ, we left out a stocking with blank papers and a pen, and each time you notice a family member doing service for someone else, you write it down and then put it in the stocking. Then on Christmas Eve night you take them out and read them one at a time. It added to the joy of the season and was fun to read. I'm excited to see how it expands as our family grows.
Then we gave Lily her yearly ornament.
This year we bought a ceramic angel from the Christmas village that says "God Jul" on it, which is Merry Christmas in Norwegian.
Christmas morning!
Opening stockings:
(Lily showing us her starbursts)
Our stash of American food! It sounds silly, but we were so excited to have some American treats. I asked our friends to pick up a few things at the NATO base to surprise Barrett in his stockings. We ate everything within a week, ha ha.
We had Barrett's family on FaceTime while we opened the presents they sent. We were able to video with my mom and sister's family, plus my dad, brother, and grandpa that night.
Opening presents:
Lily's big gift was the FisherPrice Little People house.
A family in our ward invited us for dinner on Christmas, and the food was amazing! They cooked a turkey, homemade stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy....mmmm. It was so good! Overall, we missed family a lot, but we had a great Christmas.
