Christmas is coming...

... and the duck is hopefully getting fat! Yes, we should be eating duck this year for our sixth Christmas in Benin. On days when the internet is working I have been looking up recipes and working out how to adapt them to the ingredients available here!

I still find it hard to believe it's Christmas when the weather is over 35°C in the afternoons, but for our kids this is normal. Simon only had two Christmasses in Europe, and Benjy and Eve have never celebrated Christmas anywhere but Benin.

When we first arrived in the village in 2010 there were very few signs of Christmas even in our nearest town, Kandi. But this year there are a few plastic trees and blow-up Santas being sold. Even so, I use the absence of Christmas outside the home as a good excuse to decorate inside our house. We have made paperchains, snowflakes for our windows, fluffy sheep for the Christmas tree (made with raw cotton from the field next to our house) and a paper star for the tree too. And thanks to some gold paint, I have made bells out of yoghurt pots, and knitted a big red bow to tie them together, and spray-painted an old shampoo bottle to make a festive vase.

We have the same very tall (and straight!) tree as usual - which I enjoy because we can put the child-proof ornaments at the bottom, and the fragile ones higher up!

We also have a Nativity scene made of wood which someone passed onto us, and an Advent Calendar, both of which help us to remember that we are, as it were, waiting for the birth of Jesus in this time of Advent.