Tufani's blog: Pictures from this past week

This is the great group of gals that got together on the 19th of December to make Christmas cookies. Home made Christmas cookies have been a tradition with me for many , many years..
But since last year this tradition has been adopted among my Agadir friends , too.
I bring the recipes, the " special"ingredients AND the translations and everyone comes equipped with a rolling pin , an apron and tupperware for taking home!!
It's great fun: making the dough, rolling them out, cutting and painting them...baking and TASTING them..
I love days like this one.......we work, create, sip tea and snack, but most of all we laugh!!
We started around 14:00 and left at 18:00 each one clutching a box of cookies.....Layla had her goodies , too, plus a house filled with the wonderful lingering fragrance of warm sweet spicey Christmas cookies.

Hail , hail the gang's all here!!

Making candy cane cookies.

Very concentrated efforts go into mixing the dough!!

This picture is a bit out of order...the cookies are already baked and on the platters.

Do you recognize them??!!

Helen's cutting out the gingerbread stars, trees and boys!!

Another event leading up to Christmas was our Christmas concert on the 20th of December. Over the years our small international choir at church has participated in many concerts for Christmas, but for differents reasons, we've not been able to do one since 2005. This year was a real challange as we had only about five weeks to put it together.

We were "the veterans" as I call us, the small group who have sung with the choir for many years , and the "reinforcements", a dozen African students from our parish who are here in Agadir studying at the different Universites. We made a remarkable team. The kids, as I call them, added not only voices, but energy and enthusiasm to our choir. They had lots of new music to learn...classic composers that they're not familiar with, but they didn't falter, and together we presented a great program. The concert was a big success.

Two hundred and fifty people crowded into our beautiful little church. At the end of the concert everyone was all on their feet , clapping,and cheering. As they came to congratulate us, their red rosey cheeks testified to the Christmas joy they'd experienced through our music. I think there's nothing more satifying and fulfilling for a choir than to know they've pronfondly touched their audience. For us too, it was a wonderful!

Here a series of pictures taken during the concert . You can't really see that much, but you will constat how full the sanctuary was and the enthusiam of the group in the last picture.

The next series of pictures were taken on the 22nd and 24th of December...The kids from our parish put on the natuvity play for the eight o'clock mass, and of course they had to practice a bit first!! The older kids read the text and the younger ones inacted it.. I was too busy to get pictures on the 24th(because of th choir that was singing, too) so I took snaps of the rehersals.

I took MANY more than I'm posting, now as I look at them, I think maybe I should've added more...

I trust you'll enjoy these pictures even if you don't know the children..they may take you back MANY YEARS to when you were in a nativity play for Chrstmas.