MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

We´re finally in the last moments before the big day!! It has been raining all day so it is starting to feel a little like Christmas. I caught a flu bug today!! yipeeee! and am trying to pretend I do not have it. We have had a week full of Christmas crafts (the kids think I am a crazy recycle lady because I rarely use bought materials) and tonight I have planned a family craft night. I am going to organize stations with different ideas and supplies and the "families" can create together. We now have THREE strands of Christmas lights! and almost nothing else so this will be my last push to do a little decorating. I have been spending my evenings creating decorations for our Christmas eve dinner. I asked to be OUT of the kitchen and proposed that instead I do the decorating. My little brain wants to do every.single.thing. and it is quite exhausting, but totally fun. Thank goodness my mom sent me a big circle cutter and for the salt dough recipe for ornaments. This afternoon the kids and I are going to prepare a play for Christmas eve. I am praying that they listen to me a few times as my head is about to explode already. Pray.for.me :) oh and we made paper snowflakes, like every five year old. They had no idea what I was trying to create. "such pretty flowers, erica!" they said. I just laughed. snow is so not in their reality.

Tonight Mateus´s parents are arriving. I have never met them so it is exciting for me. I just hope they actually come. He will be totally sad if they flake out. So tomorrow it will be a dinner of 17 people! and will be nice to feel a little bit like my big family dinners. We have mass at eleven pm and then a little party afterward. We will be roasting smores that my parents brought back in november!! then we have mass AGAIN at 5:30am (yikes) and mass again at 11am for Daniel and Tete´s first communion. Please put them into your prayers these next few days. Then we will have a lunch together and then I´m sure take some good naps and maybe swim in the lake (although that lake may be the cause of this flu).

Yesterday we made visits in Passagem. We visited one of my favorite people, Dona Maria dos Reis (the woman whom I am with in my sponsor letter photos). She told me that on our feast day (Dec 8) she was sitting at her table crying because all of her friends were going to the Fazenda and it was the first year she couldn´t go because she is too ill to walk. She cried and cried. And then I showed up in our car. I was waiting for the group to walk as our pilgrimage and felt this need to drive to her house and see if she was going. I can´t really explain what it was--I couldn´t get her out of my mind or heart. When we pulled up, she said no she couldn´t go, she was sick. But then realized that it was God who asnwered her prayers. She quickly took a shower and was in the car in five minutes (never seen an old lady move so quickly!) She told me she even forgot to take her medicine, yet the entire day she didn´t feel badly. And in the end, the priest drove her back home. She cried. My eyes welled. I told her it wasn´t me, I could take no credit because it was really God. Who we think doesn´t actually hear our cries. He does. And He answers.

Just like He answered His people´s cry and sent His Son to save us.
Merry Christmas,
Erica and all of the Fazenda do Natal