:: December Christmas Celebrations ::

During the holiday season the Amish schools have their Christmas programs.  We were privileged to be invited to two different school programs in December of 2013.  On of our neighbor's is teaching a school full of 29 energetic children and invited us to her school's Christmas program on Wednesday.  An Amish school Christmas program is usually around 1 hour long.  They're packed full of poems, songs, and skits by the scholars.  Each child memorizes amazing amounts to recite to the audience of parents, siblings, and friends.  The teacher always gives her students Christmas presents and so this year our friend bought tan material for the girls and red for the boys.  They took the material home and their mothers made the boys all matching shirts and dresses for the girls to wear at the program.  We weren't able to take any pictures during the program because most Amish don't believe in cameras/pictures, but she invited us back after her school children went home on Friday.

 

On our way to our friend's school we saw this wagon full of school children coming home from caroling...usually we see them in horse-drawn wagons but this time it happened they were being pulled by a tractor.

 

Her grandmother came in one day and painted the winter scene on her chalkboard in about four hours!  Notice the alphabets above the chalkboard...It's the German cursive and print above the regular English cursive and print alphabets.  The older scholars practice writing passages of scripture in old German cursive in school.

 

 Streamers and snowflakes decorating the ceiling...

 

 She also traced all her students feet and put them on the ceiling with a quote that said, "Jesus will lead us every step of the way".

 

Window decorations...

 

The desks are pushed to the sides of the room and benches they use for church in their homes are brought in the day of the program to seat everyone.

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Christmas Eve we exchanged presents with each other and then on Christmas Day we drove down to Delaware to Grandpoppy & Grandmommy's house.

 

 Benjamin's first Christmas! :)
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New Year's Eve the youth group had a gathering at the Bomberger's but since it was only until 9 p.m., and some of us still wanted to hang out, we invited some of our awesome cousins over to Grandpa & Grammy's until 2 a.m.  It was a very fun night and great people to pray the New Year in with!  :)

 

Hoping each one of you had a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year!

May 2014 be filled with blessings from the Lord and wonderful memories with family and friends.

God bless you!

 

~Kaitlyn, for the Sanger family :)