Christmas bells are ringing...

Christmas may not be the exact same in Turkey...but it was still a perfect Christmas! I couldn't have been more happy that my family came to spend Christmas with us. It definitely would have been a weird Christmas with just the two of us! We kept traditions alive AND started new ones!

The Traditions begin...

Christmas Eve

Tradition #1 See a movie on Christmas Eve. We saw Avatar! LOVED IT!

Does anyone know where we can buy a pair of these glasses? We make these glasses look good! Just kidding.

Tradition #2 Draw names for a gift exchange. But the difference this year is we did white elephant gifts and had a 5 lira limit! As you can see above you can purchase a lot here with 5 lira (about $3.50USD). We had 15 minutes to separate in the mall and find our gifts. Then we met back in the food court and exchanged our gifts!

I bought my dad a Mars Bar, slippers and clothes pins (inside joke).

My dad randomly bought my mom a lamb?

Alycia bought Cody slippers, water, and Haribo candy!

Ryan bought Alycia a little Christmas ornament the says "Tessuker" which means Thank you! That was a word she practiced the entire trip!

Mom bought Ryan his favorite crackers, cookies and slippers! He didn't think this was very white elephant because he loved all the gifts! He ate the food that night and still to this day is obsessed with his house slippers!

Cody bought me stickers! They were Turkish flags and the "All seeing eye"

And I didn't get any pictures for some reason but for our Christmas PJ's my parents bought us all Karsiyaka Tshirts and sweats! Memorabilia and Tshirts all in one.

Then came Christmas Day!

My mom bought us these adorable aprons! They make me want to cook more just so I can put it on.

Tradition #3 EAT!

We rode the ferry across the bay to go to the Swissotel for an amazing Christmas Brunch!

The Abney's came with us! They are the Humanitarian missionaries here in Turkey and they are my parents away from home. We loved having them along for Christmas day. The food was INCREDIBLE! We're talking anything you can imagine. The traditional Turkey, mashed potatoes, rolls, vegetables, gravy etc. OR there were crepes, pancakes, waffles, fruit galore, a huge salad bar, a whole wall of breads to choose from, any fish you want cooked Tepanyaki style, desserts, desserts and more desserts AND a "cold stone" ice cream stand where you can choose ice creams and toppings and they mixed them all together. I don't know why I didn't take pictures of the food! Can you tell I had pretty much died and gone to Heaven? It was so much fun to have amazing food and of course the cherry on top was having my family in town for Christmas!! What a blast and a Christmas to remember!