The Holidays in Cairo

Cameron's school is all decked out for the holidays.  For a small school, they work very hard at decorating with each change in season and holiday.  Here's the look for Christmas:

Cameron made this rein deer.  The two ears are his hand shapes
and the face is his foot shape, then he wrote  Merry Christmas.  

Here's the whole wall of reindeer in his classroom.

All the kids made Christmas cards.  They're displayed here:

Cameron had a very nice concert at the Irish International School.  The kids had memorized several Christmas songs like Let It Snow, Think of Christmas, Santa Clause Is Coming to Town, The Little Drummer Boy and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.

Each song was introduced by a different child.  Cameron didn't tell us beforehand that he was doing the introduction to the song Let It Snow.  His part was to say, "Although there's no snow in Cairo.  We can pretend we do.  So imagine the weather is much colder, as we sing, Let It Snow."  

After all the songs, Santa came out of the school and gave each child a present (-- the parents were instructed to send a present for their child).  Here's Cameron with Santa.

This is the second time we've seen Santa here.   The first time we saw him was at a craft fair hosted by our church.  It was convenient to see him because Cameron had concerns about Santa finding him.  Before we came to Egypt, I was asking Cameron how he felt about coming to Cairo and he said he was a little worried.  I asked him why and he said he as worried that there wouldn't be foods that he liked to eat and he was worried that Santa wouldn't know where to find him.  I told him we could write a letter to Santa to tell him we had moved to Cairo.   (The food situation has also resolved itself since he's found things he likes to eat here-- I'll do a blog entry on foods at some point.)  

Last month, Cameron had a new concern about Santa not finding him since we don't have a fireplace with chimney here.  He asked how Santa would get into our apartment.  I told him Santa could come in through the balcony door.  So when Cameron met with Santa, he told Santa that he should come through the balcony door to get in our apartment since we don't have a fireplace with a chimney.  Cameron added, "But Santa, you have to be sure to shut the balcony door when you come in to keep out the mosquitos."  Santa reassured him that he would be sure to do that.  

We didn't buy a Christmas tree for our apartment this year, but we did get a Christmas bush.  A live Christmas tree didn't seem right considering we're living in a desert. There actually are live Christmas trees sold on the block where all the plant/bush/flower shops are; there were some pretty Norfolk pines shipped in from Sweden.  But I don't want to support shipping trees to another continent so expatriots can have Christmas trees.  

The fake Christmas trees are also sold in the shops but they're expensive (almost $100 for the nice ones!)  I think our Christmas bush is just fine.  We decorated  it with lovely ornaments we bought at the church craft fair.  The little glass ornaments are made here in Cairo from recycled glass.  

We also celebrated Hannakah here which was from Dec. 1-8 this year.  We celebrate back home but I didn't think to bring the menora since I thought we'd be able to pick up something like that here, but I haven't seen anything like that, so we improvised, using floating candles in a bowl instead of a menora.  

Here is Cameron wearing one of his Hannakah presents, another thing I got at the church craft fair.  Cameron is crazy about cats this year.  He was a cat for Halloween, he draws stories about adventures of his two former cats (which we put in little bound folders), and he has started a cat collection with the allowance money he gets each week for picking up his room and helping set the table and sort the silverware into the drawers.