People say that Thanksgiving is the holiday where you stuff yourself so full that you can hardly move, but I disagree. On Thanksgiving, you have one enormous meal during which you may, if you chose, gorge yourself, but Christmas lasts for a whole season. Christmas cookies start being made weeks in advance and consequently begin being devoured weeks in advance. Then you have a Christmas Eve party, a Christmas dinner, and sometimes even more food on Boxing Day. Then of course, you must diet for the week up until New Years Eve when you are subject to eat even more. I think I should win the prize for most eaten this Christmas. Not that I totally gorged myself the entire day. While I didn’t exactly diet, I wouldn’t call myself a pig. But see, it’s very rude to refuse food and when you’re invited over to everyone’s Christmas dinner, what can you do but accept?
Christmas morning began with the usual amazingness. Family time around the tree, listening to music, eating frozen mangos and pumpkin bread that Mrs. Okken made for us. At ten, we dressed up in our new finery, crammed our family, Amy, Leah, Mrs. Jantsch and Dr. Greet into our five-seater Toyota Land Cruiser and headed to Namalu for the Christmas service at the Trinity Church in Namalu. We met the Wrights there. Pastor Emuron, when he invited us, had told us the service would start at ten, which of course meant that he would start playing Christmas music on his boom boxat 10:00. And what music it was. Not just Christmas related songs, but gospel songs with a kind of 60s beat in the back ground. I love how people blast cheesy music everywhere. It makes me happy. Then the service began with the most energetic singing in the world. Pastor Emuron’s wife, Linda, played the drums so quickly…and she never once missed a beat! I’m pretty sure my arms would’ve fallen off if I’d been drumming. She was also leading the songs most of the time, which takes serious skill. I only knew some of the songs. Many of them I had never heard before. But I still clapped away till I couldn’t feel my fingers. People were dancing, raising their hands in the air, praising God with enough enthusiasm to warm the coldest heart. Happiness seeped into everything, shining on people’s faces, radiating from the entire church building. After the sermon, there was more singing, during which more and more people came in through the door. Girls in their smart holiday skirts, men in their brightly flowered blankets, and everyone covered with beautiful beads, danced their offerings up to the front of the church. People brought anything they had, be it money or not. One woman brought a huge pot of porridge, while others brought a plastic plate or a pen or a couple of live chickens. The chickens, plate and pen were auctioned off to the congregation, one would pay 5,000, another 2,000 another 3,000 until all the chickens were paid for. Then the singing commenced again as row by row people danced back down the aisle.
Pastor Emuron had been expecting us to join him in a Christmas feast afterwards. So he led us into a little thatched building and sat us down…all 15 of us. His daughters started bringing out the plates of food. They just kept coming! Posho, matoke(a bland banana that tastes like a bland potato), rice cooked with meat, chapatti, cabbage, huge pieces of goat meat, chicken, irish (potatoes), spaghetti, two kinds of soup, beans, liver, kidney and intestines. And to top it all off, a boy came in with a crate of soda for us. I bet you they could’ve fed the entire US army with the food they had prepared. They must’ve been cooking all morning! So we sat down and dug in. By the time we had all eaten our fill, the three tables of food still looked untouched. Pastor Emuron and his family had not eaten anything in this time, so now he called all his family that could fit in the building in and they all thanked us for coming and scolded us for not finishing the food. We all laughed and in turned thanked him and his family (which is just about as big as our mission including grandchildren) for their cooking. It was almost 2:00 when we loaded into the vehicles and started home.
My good friend Susan had invited me, Anna, Mrs. Jantsch and Leah to come and share her Christmas dinner with her since her husband had been called away that morning on urgent business. So Dad dropped us off at the road side and the four of us made our way towards her home. She too had been cooking all day. There was rice cooked with onions and tea to make it brown (a Susan specialty), white posho, more chicken, beans, soup, and scrambled eggs. Let me tell you, Susan is I think the best cook I have ever met. She insists that she really has no idea how to cook and just makes it up half the time, but I have tasted her food and I say she cooks the best posho and beans I have ever tasted. But today she had cooked for us a special Christmas meal. SO we all sat down in the cool of her house and ate once again till we thought we would burst. It only took one plate to fill me up. But the food was so good, I wanted to eat more. I think everyone expects you to finish the food when you go to their house for Susan too scolded us for not finishing it. Well, the eskari will be happy tonight, she said.
Normally, we go to the dance down at the Catholic Church every Christmas, so Susan escorted us back to the mission so she could continue with us there. I decided to stay home and help mom with the cleaning up and cooking for tonight’s mission dinner at 6:00. Was it already 4:00? Oh boy. So after processing the fresh green beans we had brought up from Mbale and putting them aside in a pot, I lay down on the couch and slept off the several pounds I had gained since noon. Mean while, James and Bobby were playing with James’s new iHome speaker that he got for Christmas and decided it would be really funny to blast fart noises that came on James’s iTouch, in my ear on the speaker’s top volume. Happy Christmas to you too. I threw a pillow at him.
I hardly need to mention the sick feeling in my stomach as I munched down the third delicious chicken dinner since noon. Mr. Wright had created a culinary masterpiece out of chicken, bacon and mushrooms. Then there were green beans, mashed potatoes, cooked carrots and bread. And Mrs. Jantsch had baked a chocolate bundt cake for desert to go with Mrs. Okken’s Christmas cookies. It was all very well prepared and absolutely delicious, but I still ended my day collapsed on the couch. Oh, what we missionaries suffer!
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