And why I''m posting this in March: This is catch up time ---it's going to take about five more posts to get current. The Christmas tree was put up in the branch foyer early in December, but then came the huge celebration on New Year's Day, and many days thereafter, and THEN on January 6 some people celebrated Christmas as a religious holiday. We did, and the branch did.
I popped five batches of popcorn---the old-fashioned way--- and brought them to a Young Women activity where the YW were going to make a cake, and the primary leaders were going to let me help make sugar cookies for the children to decorate on Saturday. It was bedlam. (I'm adapting rapidly to the unhygienic way of things. I may have to be retaught when I get home.) We had to leave to run many blocks to the marketplace to buy parchment paper for the cake pans---they buy it by the centimeter because that's all they can afford to do. But after going out into the hall to mix cake batter, and cookie dough (because that's the only outlet that worked) and an interlude where they paused to laugh uproariously over my Ikea measuring spoons (these people find great delight in the simplest things, such as Elder Blunck telling them in a branch counsel meeting that unless they were going to talk REALLY fast they'd better allow more than 15 minutes for the meeting) anyway, we had a frenzied noisy chaotic jolly old time, and ended up with a quite pretty and tasty cake, which we then gobbled down, and two trays full of kind of lopsided sugar cookies and a clean kitchen. This activity took place on Wednesday. By the time our meetings were over on Sunday the little tree, with magical LED lights, had transformed into a very charming Christmas tree with strings of popcorn, and cookies decorated with magic markers, and sprinkled with sugar.