I’ve been finding it a little hard to get into a holiday mood.

If you live in a country where Christmas starts as soon as the back-to-school sales are over, it might be hard to imagine anyone feeling nostalgia for department stores.  But at least at the mall you can count on some tinsel and fa-la-la.  These things are practically nonexistent in Addis.  Even in Damascus there were Christmas decorations at the school and in shops around town.  I could use some silver bells, chestnuts roasting, and pine trees.

The atmosphere around here is so lacking in holiday spirit that I wasn’t even going to bother decorating the house. But then our friends Leslie and Brian had us over for board games, and they had a tree, and candles, and Christmas music, and it was really nice.

So I went home and got Andreas to drag the lavender bush in off the porch. I put the Christmas iTunes folder on shuffle. The candles were taken care of (we only have power about 5 hours a day at the moment, so we keep plenty on hand.) We lit a fire in the fireplace. Just a real old-fashioned Christmas. Except that it smells more like Victoria’s Secret than a pine forest.

Here’s a three-year retrospective of our ex-pat Christmas trees.

2011 – Damascus, Syria. We learned later that the school guards went to a quite dangerous part of the city to find this fir tree for us.

2012 – Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The houseplant from the 2nd floor foyer.

2013 – Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Our lavender bush.