Merry Christmas!

Al, Sal, Ellie & Joe would first like to wish all our friends around the world a… ¡FELIZ NAVIDAD!   MERRY CHRISTMAS!

At Christmas (& because of Christmas) we’ve got so much to celebrate! Cue the quirky dancing family…

We hope you all have a great celebration as well as a rest, and we wish you a really blessed 2012!

Our Christmas preparations have been a little different this year (you may have noticed a lack of cards for starters) because of our new setting and routine – and leaving our decorations in our attic in Plymouth might also have had something to do with it. So, for a new season, a new tree…and paper chains and snow-flakes, 5 advent calendars from over-zealous grandparents, a Spanish carols CD (weirdly unnostalgic) and a traditional Belén (nativity scene) complete with donkey and moss on the roof. ¡Precioso!

We’re looking forward to Sal’s parents and brother joining us tomorrow to celebrate a Spanglish Christmas with us – our newly concocted Christmas tapas will be featuring.

We feel like letting out a loud, public PHEW! We’ve got through our 1^st term here!! Well into our 4^th month, we can hardly believe it’s all happened and that, strangely, it’s beginning to feel ‘normal’. Ellie’s had her 1^st term at school (seen above in her school Christmas party costume), Al’s survived his 1^st term at work and now doesn’t feel like the clueless new boy, Joe’s mastered ‘hola’ and ‘hasta luego’ and constantly entertains the locals with them, and Sally made a declaration the other day that we have been longing for…

“I think I’ve turned a small corner with my language learning!”

Yippppeeeee! A small one it may be, but such an encouraging one! Now instead of being completely unaware of the nature of a conversation, she can regularly understand the gist and contribute a few key words (nay, sentences!) in the right places – what a star she is!!!

The language exchanges, lessons and personal studying must be paying off – not to mention Bob Esponja and Dora the Explorer’s invaluable roles (Sal’s preferred learning strategy).

In regards to our team we can also happily say that things have gone positively throughout this term. We’ve begun to meet up every Saturday evening (kids and all) for a meal and for fellowship together – a real highlight of each week – and although not in our plans at all yet, we’ve already started to have some locals join in with us from time to time.

Our amazing new friends Mike & Jess, from the church in Portugal (Penafiel), gave up a big chunk of their time last month to come over and spend time with us here. Sharing personal experience, testimony, teaching, and by their friendship and prayer they left behind a much bolder and envisioned team.

Some potential team members have also been spending time here and seeing if they feel it’s right to join us. We can so easily remember being in that nerve-racking position and would love you to pray with us that they would know 'with their knowers’ what God’s saying - and hopefully that it’s to be part of us really soon! Amongst this mix we are praying for our lovely friends the Capes family, from Yeovil, who are determined and anxious to join us but who need a way forward in the sale of their house. Join us in praying for a breakthrough in this!

When it comes to making Spanish friends, things are slow and steady – slow for Al and steady for Sal! Neither of us feels we have a close friend yet but in our more sensible moments we remember that friendships are built with time and what did we expect?!  However, on a positive note (and similarly to Kevin & Ness’s blog post) we’ve been planning to have some people over for ‘English Christmas tapas’ and quickly realised that we would need to do 2 or 3 different evenings to fit in all the people we’ve become ‘friendly’ with – so that can’t be a bad thing. But pray for us in all this as well, please!

Finally, two other recent fun and eye-opening moments:



• The 9^th November was a Madrid-wide holiday that celebrated her patron saint, the Virgin of Almudena. Songs, costumes and a huge wall of flower offerings marked the day in which we enjoyed the fun and sense of community but also silently prayed that the people of Madrid might know, love and honour Jesus above all other things.

 

                          

• The 8^th December was Al’s birthday and his marvellous parents came over for a few days, staying with us for the first time. So good to catch up with them, the kids adored playing with them and we were spoiled with some other 'firsts' for us all: our first 3-course meal eating out in the heart of the city, our first trip to the cinema in Spain (‘Gato con Botas’) and the kids' first time ever at the circus. ¡Fue genial!  It was great!

We hope to catch up with many of you via skype / phone over the holidays and look forward to hearing your news. For now we leave you with typical parents-proud-of-their-kids photos: of Elizabeth, who has discovered nail polish, and of Joseph, whose giraffe rides the metro with him. J