Christmas & New Year's - In photos!

We made snowflakes to decorate our windows, but only because it's fun to
cut out snow flakes.  It's actually very rare that there would be snow here.

Here's our advent calendar (some of you might recognize!) strung up over
homemade ornaments we dried in the bread oven.  Because of the humidity
here the ornaments re-hydrated, which we only found out because a couple
of them stretched and fell off the line...!

A candle in our house is not something to take note of... unless the flame
has been brought by foot and train all the way from Bethlehem!

David (dah-VEED) put together a Christmas pagent for the
community and asked Nico and I to be Joseph and Mary.
But since our French isn't good enough to read and
memorize a handful of poetic lines, others read for us.

Cast and crew of the pagent - this group is about half the total number of people
present.  Left to right: Nico, Me, Elisabeth, Katell, Marion (voice of Mary),
David (voice of Joseph), Hervé, Amos, Benoit

This is the common room and community kitchen where all our meals and many
of our gatherings happen.  Yanni sat happily and quietly in Christiane's lap
during the performance!  :)  After the pagent, we enjoyed cookies and chocolates
and homemade brioche.  Yes, Nico made it and now knows the recipe!

Family hike on Christmas morning in the woods behind our house!
Note: this is a forest in winter... not lacking any green!

This Christmas tune has been stuck in our heads ever since... it's catchy!
The bass line is "lum lum lum", but we were singing it before dessert, so
Benoit began singing, "yum yum yum", which was kept up for the entire song.
Sorry, I'm not really sure why it's so blurry.

I made a pumpkin pie for one of our Saturday night communal
dinners, and they asked if I could make another one as a main
course for the Christmas meal.  As pumpkin pie is not a normal
thing to find in France, why not main course instead of dessert?
As you can see, it wasn't nearly as popular as the usual dishes.
From top to bottom: mushroom pie (90% gobbled), root veggie pie
(90% gobbled), pumpkin pie (90% present), leek pie (100% gobbled).

On New Year's Eve, we trodded over to a nearby field on the farm's property
to visit some newly born baby lambs!  A shepherd who doesn't have land of
his own trades wool to l'Arche to use their fields as part of a rotation.

Two babies with the mama!

Nico and Moses try to herd the sheep to the pile of food we brought.

Flowers in winter!

Our New Year's Eve festivities got out of hand!
Christiane (left) was stacking these blocks a foot or so
high for Yanni to knock down, and when he moved on,
somehow a challenge arose and she and Paul (a visitor)
used every block to build a tower up to the ceiling.

Happy New Year!