McMurray Christmas Trees - A Retrospective (by Thom)

I was thinking last night about our Christmas tree. This year is the first since we've been in Africa that we have had a traditional Christmas tree.
Our first year, in 2005, we were new in Mali and never thought to include a tree in our shipment to the field. That year I went out and bought a palm tree for Amanda and we decorated it with paper ornaments I printed out on the computer. We bought some overpriced lights locally and that was our first African Christmas tree. It wasn't a lot to look at, but it was fun for us and gave us an interesting story to share.
2006 was Miriam and Hannah's first Christmas and we decided to decorate a cactus that year. It worked well for the first couple of weeks after Thanksgiving, but we soon realized that the cactus needed a lot more sunlight than our living room provided. Thankfully, one of our friends gave us an old decoration of theirs. It was just a small tree, about 20 inches tall, but it was a tree, nonetheless. We were excited to have it and undecorated the cactus and replaced it with the small tree.
In 2007 we were blessed to be able to spend the month of December in the US with our families so we never got to put up decorations. In 2008 we had to move out of our rented house in Bamako, Mali in mid-December since we were being relocated to Dakar, Senegal. Again, no decorations went up.
That brings us to 2009 and the first time we've had a Christmas tree that we could decorate here in Africa. It's a very cool fiber-optic tree that was given to us during our furlough time this year and we all love watching the colors on the fibers rotate. It's still not a huge tree, but Miriam and Hannah certainly love it.
We've really found Christmas overseas to be an odd mixture of great-clarity and homesickness. It's a lot less commercial here and we've always seen a much clearer portrait of why we celebrate Jesus' birth but at the same time we miss those traditions and family times. This year has been quite a bit different, though. We've still had a clear focus on 'the reason for the season' but now that Miri and Hannah are starting to understand and interact more we are forming our own Christmas traditions. It's been a very fun time so far, and we still have 16 days left!