Natale in Italia

Here's Nick on Christmas morning building a new Lego toy and Isabelle proudly showing off a Barbie.

I am frantically writing blog posts to get myself caught up before I forget what has happened and never catch up.

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were really pretty low-key. On Christmas Eve we had a traditional Italian dinner of fish with just the five of us. We had fresh swordfish that I bought at the market that morning, which we all love and one of those Italian Christmas cakes in the octagonal tube kind of boxes. You know those cakes, you see them around the holidays especially at Italian owned markets like Nino's (a reference for the Detroiters). They were EVERYWHERE during the holiday season. You couldn't walk down the street without seeing at least half the people carrying one, day and night. We tried a lemon flavored one - we didn't really like it. Earlier in the week we had a more traditional one which tasted kind of like raisin bread - that one was much better. The lemon one was like lemon flavored bread with a sugary creme filling that made my teeth hurt. I probably could have scored a much better dessert at any one of the gazillion bakeries in my neighborhood, but I was a lemming and really wanted to walk down the street with my cake in the box like everyone else. After dinner we opened up some presents and ate some really great swiss chocolate that we received as a gift. We were very homesick for the annual Christmas Eve Bala-fest that is usually at our house and I had my first real bout of overall homesickness at the holidays. But overall, we had a really nice, albeit quiet, family Christmas Eve. It was a lot like our Christmas day in the US because Bill's family is in Maryland, so we are used to having one of the days to ourselves.

Santa Claus/Father Christmas/Babbo Natale found our apartment and brought everyone lots of nice gifts. Later that day we were invited to have dinner with a German family we met through the school. They have three children also; Agnes who is in Isabelle's class, Andreas who is in football club with the boys and Teresa who is in 6th grade. Regina cooked us a very wonderful, traditional dinner with soup, roast, potatoes and some incredible asparagus that was wrapped up in little "packets" with proscuitto and then baked . . . yummmm. I brought a homemade apple pie and a chocolate chip cake. It was incredibley generous of Regina to have us over, since I invited them to our apartment when I found out that they, too, would be without family on Christmas Day. However, they are here permanently and have a big house, so she insisted that we come to them and then did all the cooking! (She also baked Isabelle's birthday cake, but that is another story for the Isabelle-birthday blog.) It was a wonderful afternoon and the kids all had a lot of fun together and we only broke one of their good wine glasses (really, we did break one of their good wine glasses, I don't need to make this stuff up, it just happens). It was a memorable Christmas Day with some other expats and just another one of our great adventures.

Sam and Isabelle a little bit later in the day with some more of their Christmas loot.