Thailand: Christmas!

We arrived back home from Koh Tao on Christmas Eve.  We were quite exhausted, but my dad and brother managed to pull together a great Christmas Eve program.  We read the nativity story and mixed in a little Christmas music -- angklung style.

Angklungs?  Yes, angklungs.  On one of my dad's many work trips (Indonesia, I think) he picked up some angklungs.  Some families play the bells on Christmas eve, but we play the angklungs.  He worked hard for weeks writing music for us all to follow.  We did a few practice songs before the program, and my mom took some video.  It was pretty fun.  Don't we sound almost professional?

Going to Thailand was our Christmas gift this year, which is the best gift we could have asked for.  And yet, when we woke up Sunday morning, my mom announced that Santa had come while we were sleeping.  So we were all pretty thrilled to get downstairs.  Per Gailey family tradition, we all lined up on the stairs in age order.

The girls all got great Thailand totes and the guys all got Thai silk ties.  And Austin?  Well,  you can imagine that his Nana spoiled him rotten.  Somehow I only have pictures of him opening his "laptop," which he LOVES, but my mom also got him these cool leap frog books with a pen that will read the book out loud or make other sounds depending on where on the page you tap the pen.

After church some of us decided to go to Chatuchak -- the weekend market.  It's only about 20 minutes from my parent's house, and it is HUGE.  We walked through the animal section first.  You could buy almost any kind of weird animal at the market -- squirrels, sharks, ducks, hedge hogs, alligator...

It was so crowded that we didn't have a chance to take many pictures.  It was great to get a great dose of Thai culture.

We came home for a delicious Christmas dinner.  It was great to be together as a family.  It was the perfect Christmas day.  So great that I'd love to repeat it next year.