Christmas Morning 2010

What the boys walked into after Santa came...even though half of the presents this year were small like DVD's and Nintendo DS Games, Santa wrapped them in big boxes for effect! The boys LOVED it. We have definitely decided that watching your kiddos on Christmas morning is one of the great joys of life!

Now here Santa showed real smarts...what better gift for two kids stocking stuffers living in Istanbul than some awesome headlamps? For power outages, you know. We don't get a ton, but we have certainly had our share of "brown outs". Mom and Dad each have one, and the boys always want to use them. Now we can each have one tucked safely in our bedside tables! Santa did a great job with the colors too, Porter's is green-the color of monsters of course!

Ronan and his favorite gift of the year...WOODY! Too bad he was too enthralled with the new video on the TV and pulling the string on Woody's back over and over for a decent picture.

Ronan again enthralled by a new gift, Chutes and Ladders from Aunt Katie. Maybe if he stares at it long enough he will learn how to read!

Now ridiculous as I am, I realized that besides these two photos of Ronan I actually didn't get any more of Christmas morning! We got a ton of video, which there is far too much of to try and upload; but then I realized too late I'm afraid that I hadn't gotten many actual pictures. So sorry, this will have to do with a promise to do better next year!

We had a terrific rest of our day, spent mostly in our new pjs, and I tried after modifying the recipe by trial and error to make homemade cinnamon rolls! They eventually turned out pretty decent actually and we chowed down on far too many, washed down by some yummy hot chocolate!

Finally, that evening we combined forces with our pals to actually create quite a large, delicious, and basically traditional Christmas dinner. We shared each other's traditions and enjoyed both ham and cheesy potatoes and swedish meatballs! We also had some amazing deserts, an amazing pie made by Miss C, and we provided our "Turkified" version of my family's "Christmas Drink, or (Green Drink as it is sometimes called)".

Now this is a tradition that we have done in my family every single year that I can remember. A recipe that all of the grandkids were tutored in many years in a row. Now the traditional recipe includes vanilla ice cream, lime sherbet, pineapple juice, and ginger ale.

Here in Turkey, we had to make do with what we could. (Now we have dabbled in other flavors at home in the States for other holidays such as Halloween and Valentine's Day (orange and raspberry sherbet substitutes) so we knew it could probably be done. Since there was nothing remotely close to lime sherbet anywhere to be found, or sherbet really at all...we settled on some Raspberry Sorbet instead. Now, I think we paid $19 (US) for this sorbet instead of the few bucks for some lime sherbet, but it was worth it!

I had to get a picture of the ingredients we used for our first overseas Christmas drink, then we can compare in the future! So instead of the lime sherbet we used raspberry sorbet, and instead of the ginger ale we used mostly sprite (we found one can of ginger ale at the American Store, but that was all-we should have shopped sooner I guess!), and instead of getting a big thing of pineapple juice we had to drain cans of pineapple chunks. All in all it worked out pretty well and it was actually very delicious! We were proud of ourselves for making the moment happen no matter what, and I think it was enjoyed by all!

The finished product-and a finished blog post! We hope everyone's holiday was as nice as ours!

Merry Christmas!