Christmas seems like a long time ago, and it’s been a fun holiday. Holiday festivities finally picked up at DCU during the last week before Western Christmas. Although we had to teach Saturday English classes on Christmas Eve morning, we spent the evening with Americans friends and enjoyed a typical holiday feast. We thought December 25 was just going to be an ordinary Sunday in church, since Ukrainians generally celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7. But we were happily surprised to hear a couple Christmas-themed sermons, and enjoyed singing Joy to the World and Silent Night.
Our guests for Christmas evening were the Konoplitsky’s, a couple from church. We made another traditional Christmas dinner, and had fun describing the different dishes to our guests, most of which were unfamiliar to them. At one point in the evening the conversation switched to peanut butter, and we produced our imported jar for them to sample this foreign food for the first time. (They said they had wanted to try it ever since they saw Brad Pitt eating it in “Meet Joe Black.” Such are the cultural influences American movies have in the rest of the world). It was a fun but tiring night as we concentrated as hard as we could to understand and be understood in Russian. By the end, a lot was going over our heads. But it didn’t seem to matter too much.
Laura
