Oma's Pages #27

Oma’s Pages #27

Well, I think this story has come up to Christmas Eve of last year. We were invited to go to the home (which is actually an apartment in a high rise building... but here they call wherever you live a house or a home. This was confusing to me when I first started coming to the Netherlands back in the late 1970’s and early 80’s but now I am used to it.) of Puck Boorsma.

Puck is a tiny widow with a big heart. She has one adopted son who has never married and who visits her for Christmas and I think she sees him a couple of times a year but that is all. She also has an older daughter who lives in the United States and she hardly ever sees her. Puck is always smiling. She is very much alone and is starting to have the kinds of problems that older people have and yet she is always smiling.

Her Christmas tradition is to invite the Missionaries over to her house for Christmas Eve each year. She also invited her friends, Hans and Doris. They don’t have any children. They have two dogs that are their children. These dogs act just like children. In one of the pictures Doris is giving them their Christmas gift and they acted just like a couple of kids who were so excited to open their gift. And they opened it by themselves. They are Tibetan Terriers.

It was an interesting dinner. When we arrived we had a small bowl of soup. Later she called us back to the table and she placed this work of art salad that I have posted a picture of. We all took a small helping of the salad. That was our dinner.

We opened the gifts and then we came back to the table and had a dessert. The Elders had to go home at 9:00 so we all excused ourselves and we took them home. 

Then we went home and prepared their Christmas stockings for them. That was a fun thing to do.

We went home again and used up some of our Vodafone prepaid minutes so we could Skype with the family for Christmas. It was long after midnight when we finally dropped into bed. I was so glad I could sleep in for Christmas... since we hardly ever got to do that.

Do you remember talking to us last Christmas Eve Day?