Robyn.Bowles.es

Although the beautiful, sunny, 50-ish degree days and lack of snow make it difficult to believe it is Christmas, we have believed the calendar and streets full of Christmas lights and have forged ahead with celebrating Christmas.

First was the Christmas program at our church, Mountainview International. Samuel and I were both involved in the program that took place in old movie theater in a mall outside the city on December 14. It was a great blessing to be able to have our special program there because the facilities were great and there was no way we would have been able to fit the over 150 people who came in our usual Sunday meeting place (we’re packed with about 40)!

I sang “O Holy Night” as an offertory, and also helped lead the singing of Christmas Carols with the worship band. Samuel ran the technical aspects of the program and had put together a couple of “Keynote” (the Apple equivalent of “Power Point”) presentations. He had stayed up several very late nights to make it as perfect as possible.

You can check out some pictures of the event at: http://www.unplowedground.com/photo.html . Unfortunately we realized that our camera battery was dead when we got there.

This past Saturday was filled with more activity. I had organized a small group of people from our church to go out the the busy shopping area of Gran Via to sing Christmas Carols and collect money for the Red Cross of Madrid. Seven of us sang our hearts out for about an hour and collected 32.42 Euros! We had so much fun and found that the most crowd-pleasing songs were “Joy to The World” and “Jingle Bells”.

Before hitting the streets, we lit our Menorah candles in celebration of the second day of Hanukkah. The group joined us in the the traditional Hebrew prayer.

After singing we came back to our apartment where we hosted a party of over 20 friends and their friends! It was great to have a full house of people from all over the world including Spain, Belgium, Germany, Scotland and the U.S. The last of our guests left close to 3 a.m. (very Spanish, although the one Spaniard left at about 10:30 pm – very non-Spanish of him!)

We realized that we had a very talented group of people among us when we got out the guitar! Our friend Michael played some beautiful classical Spanish music. We also heard a bit of flamenco, and some noble attempts at Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan among others. Samuel and I performed a few of his originals also. Michael on guitar.

A good time was had by all and we spent the next day in our pajamas in front of the TV watching movies and ignoring most of the mess until Monday.

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