by Inge Schmidt
A few days before Halloween, a friend and I were shopping for pumpkins to carve. But all we could find were candy canes and Santa figurines. A few weeks later, I was out shopping and the store had Christmas carols playing over the loud speaker. From the looks of it, Christmas was all around me. But it didn’t feel like Christmas to me.
For a split second, I debated running into the store, picking up some lights, an ornament or two, and a small house plant (let’s face it, Christmas trees are expensive!), and calling it Christmas in my apartment. But I realized that I was craving something deeper than the material artifacts of Christmas-I was longing for a higher sense of Christmas. So for the next several days, I embarked on a spiritual search for Christmas.
Even though Christmas has already passed, imagine you opened your last gift today and you got 3 Months handed to you on a big silver plate, filled with whatever you want. That’s where I am right now. So far on my plate is a big slab of Spain with a mound of new friends to one side, a city at my disposal on the other, and all of it sprinkled with a heavy coating of Spanish speaking. Now I’m in a new country with a ‘different, not weird’ culture, as Quique our director likes to put it. (more…)
