It's Christmas!!! Happy Birthday Jesus!

Merry Christmas to all our friends and family around the world. We love you and wish we had all of you here with us this Christmas season!

We celebrated this evening a few hours ahead of the rest of you, in the European tradition of opening the gifts on Christmas Eve. Everyone else does it this way here, so we figured we would too. Anyway tomorrow we are all off to dinner at Eman's sister's with all his family, so it was good to just go ahead and have an evening Christmas this year.

They don't have Santa Claus here exactly. They have these naughty guys called "Yule Lads" who get up to mischief each of the 12 days before the 25th.....we were thinking of trying to introduce the concept of Santa Claus to Iceland. After you see how these Yule dudes behave you are mighty thankful that you did not grow up here teaching your kids about these guys! If you are naughty you get a potato in your shoe....but I'd like to know who gave them permission to see was naughty or nice? Santa now looks like a saint, which I'm sure he was anyway.


Ok, so you were asking me if it really is dark all day long at this time of year? Thankfully the answer is no and again somewhere on this page you will find a picture of the sunrise taken at approimately 11:30 AM on the 22nd of December. So the sun starts to climb in the sky around this time but two hours later it starts setting and disappears at about 3:30 PM. There's so much talk about depression etc here because of this but it's not the lack of sunshine that gets me down but how much they talk about how depressed they all are! It's no wonder they are so down! and those Yule Lads have seriously got to have a change in attitude because they are not helping any....

The next post is will be a beautiful story of one young woman in Iceland whose life changed for the better just one week before Christmas. Tomorrow, I promise!

Have a beautiful beautiful Christmas. Every year the Lord does something very special for us. Those are the most unique gifts from Him, and I'd love to hear from any of you about what made this Christmas special for you!

Gleðileg Jol!