MAPLE CITY BAPTIST CHURCH

updates

January 2011 Blog:

Christmas, lovely Christmas. Not the Christmas of my childhood, since I didn't grow up in the tropics, but in the far regions of the north, but a lovely one nevertheless! And I've begun to notice that the longer I live here, the more I like the tropical Christmas traditions we are establishing :) I guess that's a good thing, right?!?
One of our fairly new traditions is to build a Christmas hut. A few years ago, we starting asking around for local Christmas traditions. We didn't hear of too many to implement, but this one caught our fancy.

This tradition was much more commonly held in the past, but is still done in the villages a bit today - the building of a Christmas hut!
On Christmas Eve morn, we head out to find dead palm branches. As we have lots of palm trees here, that one isn't usually too difficult. This year was a little trickier than other years, because the palms in front of our house got trimmed a while back and didn't have enough dead branches. John and Andrew pulled out the ladder, and went to work.

A bit of twine, a lot of dirt and dust in the eyes, and a few scrapes later, we had the base of our hut. Now mind you, when the children build them in the village, they sharpen sticks and sink them into the ground, and then actually weave the walls of the hut, but we do what we can. Have you ever tried to shove a sharp stick into concrete? It doesn't work too well. So maybe I should call this a Christmas teepee instead? Now it's time to add the rest of the branches and make sure everything is holding together. Nothing like having a Christmas hut fall on your head!

John Sommer