International Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!! I you are all enjoying a wonderful holiday season with family and friends : ) Celebrating Christmas in another country is always difficult for me as I would rather be home surrounded by loved ones and yes, even snow, but Drew and I did our best to make the most of the holiday in Luxor.

Drew was very nice and had kept the small Christmas tree that we had bought in Cairo a few years ago, which we were able to find some new decorations for, in addition to our awesome Egyptian snowman! He comes complete with a desert color scheme and sparkly galabeya (a traditional outfit for most of the men in Luxor… minus the sparkles).

In addition to our decorations, we were even able to find snow in a grocery store. Yes, you read correctly. You never know what you're going to come across in grocery stores in Luxor… it's sort of like a treasure hunt to see what goodies you can find hidden on the shelves. A jar of peanut butter here, a container of cream cheese there, OR a can of Funny Snow! Drew and I decided that we had to have two cans of Funny Snow and after buying it we promptly rushed home to try it out on our roommate's doors : ) Now we assumed that this snow in a can would be just like the stuff you can get in the US. You shake it, spray on windows until it looks suitably snow covered, repeat. So we set about spraying snow to our hearts content until…. sniff, sniff, sniff…. sniff, sniff, sniff…. why does this snow smell like roses?? Turns out that Funny Snow is in fact nothing more than aerated soap and sadly it dissolves into a rose-scented film in about 30 seconds. But we had a great time playing with it none the less.

As for the Christmas celebration itself, we had quite the international holiday. Christmas Eve was spent at the Marsam Hotel, which is owned by Klaus and Claudia… the same lovely people form the camel trek. They invited us to celebrate a German Christmas with them, which was absolutely lovely! Claudia completely out did herself with decorating thanks to LOTS of imported decorations that had been transported from Germany by their son. The food was absolutely phenomenal as well! The entire staff at the hotel went all out in preparing dishes and even made fruit and vegetable sculptures! The highlight of the dinner though was Klaus' sheep, which had come from his own flock and was soaked in three bottles of red wine before being slow-cooked in the over for 6 hours. Melt-in-your-mouth does not even begin to describe how delicious it was. And in case 3 bottles of wine in the cooking process wasn't enough, there was a delicious red wine sauce to pour over the meat. Needless to say we left there very well fed and very thankful to have had the opportunity to share Christmas with them.

The dinner table had this awesome veggie sculpture

And the dessert table had so many different kinds of carved fruit I lost count

Abd-allah and Drew getting in to the Christmas spirit!

Our Christmas Day dinner was spent with our roommate, Abd-allah, at a British tea room on the east bank of Luxor. It was his first Christmas celebration and he was a very good sport about getting into the spirit of things. Chris, the owner of the restaurant, prepared a full roast turkey dinner which was super yummy, but I have to say I think the highlight of the evening was the traditional Egyptian band that was brought in as entertainment. In addition to being an excellent cook, Chris is also an excellent belly dancer…. I am not.

So there you go, for those of you wondering how you celebrate Christmas in a non-Christian country, now you know : ) In the end the important things about Christmas can be found regardless of what country you're in: good friends, good food and good memories… and that's what Christmas is all about Charlie Brown.

Merry Christmas!!