We had a very busy and full month of December! The Christmas season gave us several out-of-the-ordinary opportunities to reach out to our community with the good news of the gospel. Our church decided this year to hold our first-ever Christmas Eve service. As far as we know, there were no other Christmas Eve services in our town (there was one the next town over at the Lutheran church, and one at the military base chapel not far from here, but nothing right here in our town of Ādaži. A week or so before Christmas Eve, our whole church baked hundreds (maybe thousands?) of piparkukas (small crisp gingerbread cookies), packaged them up with ribbon and invitations, and went out on the streets to invite people to our service. I’ll be honest, I (Patty) thought going out on the streets on a snowy Sunday afternoon would prove to be a rather fruitless endeavor, but we gave out all of our cookies and invitations within the first 20-30 minutes! Several people in our town had never heard of our church before, but were happy to receive the small gift and invitation.
The actual Christmas Eve service was held in our town hall and cultural center. The room that we had rented out was completely full! Several of our church members invited unchurched family, friends, and neighbors, and we even had a few people show up on their own. The gospel was clearly presented in word and in music and our prayer is that these small seeds would bear fruit in our community.
One Saturday morning in December, we invited several of our girls’ friends from our neighborhood over to bake Christmas cookies. We of course did piparkukas (gingerbread), but we also introduced them to my grandma’s famous Christmas sugar cookies! While the cookies were baking, I gathered all the little girls around for me to read them the Christmas story from our Latvian children’s Bible. I had them all raise their hands when they heard a word that matched one of our cookie cutters (e.g. star, angel, etc.). They thought that was pretty fun! We sent each little girl home with a big plate of cookies for their families, which we hope was a fun Christmas surprise for our neighbors!
In Latvia, the Christmas season actually lasts for several days after the 25thof December. Part of the reason for this is that people with Russian background don’t actually celebrate until the 1stor even the 6thof January. Because of this, we hosted a neighborhood Christmas get-together between Christmas and New Years. We invited several of our neighborhood friends (both from our church and not from our church) to come over for games and lots of American Christmas goodies! We had a wonderful time playing silly Christmas games (think Minute to Win It), and the homemade fudge and peppermint patties were a big hit! We were also able to share with our neighbors some of the ways that we celebrate Christmas in our family and why it is such a special holiday for us as we remember the greatest gift that we could ever be given – the gift of God’s Son.
