Christmas Time!!

OK, I am going to smoosh all our Christmas season happenings into one long post, because I have been neglecting the blog badly lately! First off, Gryphon's band class (she plays alto sax) and choir club gave concerts at various places around the post. The above photo is at a concert at the big hotel here, the Dragon Hill, and below is the Christmas tree lighting ceremony. She had a blast,because they went out to lunch at various fast food restaurants after the concerts!

Christmas shopping was done mostly online, but the girls and I headed down to Itaewon to buy Mark some gifts. We ate at McDonalds, which the kids adore of course. No, we didn't have the Bulgogi burger. We have only had McD's in Korea 3 times, because I prefer to eat all the Korean food, but also because it just seems so stereotypical- look at the Americans, eating McDonalds!! We were hunting up and down the main drag of Itaewon for boxer shorts printed with denominations of Korean money. Yes, that is what Mark asked for!The Boy Scouts on post get live trees in, but you must preorder and I had heard they are in really bad shape- they are sent from somewhere far away. (In case you don't know, while South Korea is forested now, the Japanese cut down every tree in the country practically during the occupation. So, trees are a valuable thing in Korea, cutting one down is really frowned upon, and there are no Christmas tree farms!)So for the first time ever we got a *fake* tree. This is how it looked out of the box. It looked okay put up and decorated, but...still looks pretty fake!We decorated our little scuzzy front porch area.Christmas Eve we went to dinner at the Hartell House. It was yummy, roast beast.

Then Christmas morning came, and the girls had a good one.

Aunt Jill, the doll was a hit!!




We spent a large portion of Christmas day playing Mario Carts!

Then a friend, Matt, came over and we cooked a ton of food for Christmas dinner. Matt is a great cook.

Main course was goose, looking sort of raggedy here because I didn't think to get a photo before carving it all up!!

It was a good Christmas, nice to stay home and not travel, we even got snow (that's another post to come) and the kids have been sledding for days now.

Merry Christmas!!!