1000 Leagues Across the Sea: Birthdays, Thanksgiving, and AFS Christmas

Hi All,

So I have quite a lot to tell you all about! We'll start with where I left off: the week after my trip to Paris. Two Thursdays ago, we celebrated Stephane's birthday. Alice made him a cake with dried fruit, his favorite. I made a yogurt cake with chocolate chips because Alice doesn't like cake with dried fruit.

So then on Saturday I spent the day cooking cornbread, stuffing, green bean casserole, gravy, mashed potatoes, turkey, and pumpkin pie. Sounds familiar? That's because I was making a Thanksgiving dinner!

I cooked all day, and in the evening Elizabete and Michela came with their host families--a real multicultural Thanksgiving meal.

So I explained to everyone what Thanksgiving is all about (although every American kid learns about it in school, the Europeans know no more about the holiday than that we eat lots of turkey)...

...and everyone tried a bit of everything:

For dessert, in addition to pumpkin pie, Michela made us a tiramisu and Elizabete brought a Latvian honey cake. YUMMMM!

So once Thanksgiving was out of the way, we could start thinking about Christmas. On Sunday, Stephane and Alice told me it was time to put up the Christmas tree. So Stephane went into his shed and brought out this:

So for the first time in my life, I helped construct a Christmas tree.

Still, it came out pretty well, I think!

So this Saturday I took the train to Poitiers for the AFS Christmas party. We spent the day preparing a Christmas show for the hostparents. It's so cool to have twenty-some friends from so many different countries. I now know people from Germany, Italy, Brazil, Norway, Sweden, Argentina, Denmark, and Latvia!

So in the evening the host families came bringing a potluck dinner. Throughout the evening we exchange students introduced ourselves, and many of us presented something about ourselves our our country. We even learned a Swedish folk dance!