Never once did I consider the fact that there are no evergreens on a Caribbean island.  And it never dawned on me that we may not be having a tree, even though it really didn't feel like Christmas anyway with the 75 degree weather and the trips to the beach etc.

But as always, necessity is the Mother of invention and before long Jonas and the kids were hopping in the hoopty van proclaiming to return with a Christmas-looking tree.

Well..... let's just say that our little defunct home-made tree matches our defuncts cars and house..... a little rough around the edges, kind'a ugly but cute as a button and definetly one of a kind



Basically the crew managed to find an evergreen-look-alike bush and they took the longest branch and drilled holes in it and stuck other branches in the holes until it roughly resembled a Christmas tree. 

Of course we have no Christmas decorations here, so we made ornaments with the kids out of fimo clay and those little melty bead thinggies that we turned into bells, candy-canes, stars and christmas trees.  We even found some sand-dollars to make snowmen out of and had a couple of real sea stars that we stung up on our tree with wire.

On the 24th we were 'guetzle' with the kids (made cookies) and 'painted' them with royal icing. We then packed them into sets of two, wrapped in clear plastic wrap and we drove all over the island dropping home-made jelly and our little cookie presents off at our friend's houses. 




The kids felt a little like Santa, just dropping goodies by un-announced and then dissapearing again in a flash and it was really neat to watch them get the point of Christmas which is to give, little things that make someone else smile.