How Did Santa Get In?

The kids were very happy Christmas morning when they discovered the stockings they had made were filled with toys and candy. Any concerns about whether Santa would know we had moved and were now floating on a sailboat in the Caribbean were put to rest as they munched on treats they discovered in their stockings from Santa. How did Santa get in, well that was the debate. Was it through the window in the bathroom that was left open, through mom and dad’s hatch above their bed, or maybe through the engine exhaust pipe. I guess we will never know.

Christmas in the Caribbean proved to be very different from Christmas back home. We did our best to preserve some of our traditions, while creating memories and potentially new traditions. The kids decorated the boat a couple of weeks ago when we first arrived in Sint Maarten. There were some decorations that were left by the previous owners and where they felt they needed more decorating they made their own. We found eggnog in one of the grocery stores on the Dutch side, so we were able to preserve our tradition of drinking eggnog as we decorated for Christmas. The kids spent several days creating paper snow flakes and paper garland from construction paper to decorate their rooms and when they were done I must say it was lovely. When we couldn’t find stockings in the stores, they created their own using cereal boxes and construction paper.

The Christmas music is always one of my favorite parts of Christmas and this year we got to add a couple of new Caribbean Christmas songs to our repertoire. The favorite being one from Antigua called “How will Santa Get Here”. It wasn’t just our favorite as we heard it everywhere we went, from radio commercials to school kids singing as we walked by in the fort at English Harbor. One of our favorite parts is:

“There is no Reindeer in my country, he will have to borrow the neighbour’s donkey

Ho Ho Ho

Ho Ho Ho

How will Santa get here?

Christmas Eve we would normally spend with Eryk’s family where they preserve some of their Polish Christmas traditions. This year we decided to go out for Christmas Eve as a special treat, so we found a nearby Lebanese restaurant and had some of the best Lebanese food I have ever tasted. Ironically, one of the Polish traditions is to eat twelve dishes to represent the twelve apostles, when we ordered our food we were pleasantly surprised that we unintentionally ended up with twelve dishes, it felt like it was meant to be. After dinner we hopped back in our dingy and returned to SeaSparrow where we indulged on some delicious macaroons we found in a bakery on the French side earlier that day. We were also able to preserve another Polish tradition of sharing Christmas wafers (which we had brought with us from Canada). The wafers are similar to the ones you get in church, but each one of us takes a piece and each person breaks off a piece of the other persons wafer eats it and then offers Christmas best wishes to one another with hugs and kisses.

Christmas morning the kids found their stockings stuffed full and sitting at the end of their beds and crawled into our bed to open them. Then Eryk decided to create a fun new Christmas morning game. He had purchased a pack of ten little cereal boxes that contained a variety of cereals, some were Fruit Loops and Corn Pop while others were a little more boring like Rice Krispies and Corn Flakes. He placed them all in a backpack and had everyone randomly draw which cereal they would get for Christmas morning. Tia was extremely disappointed when she pulled out the box of Corn Flakes, of all the types of cereals this is one we had available to eat every morning and was her least favorite. She showed good sportsmanship although clearly disappointed, she didn’t make a fuss… Eryk felt bad though and traded her for his Frosted Flakes.

After we opened our Christmas gifts from under the “tree” and had our official Christmas morning breakfast we got ready to host a Christmas lunch. We had parted ways with s/v Enigma in Antigua, they went to St. Kitts and Nevis and we headed straight for Sint Maarten. However, when they arrived in Sint Maarten on the 23^rd they found us again, so we invited them to for a Christmas lunch aboard SeaSparrow. We had a lovely time, and it was nice to be able to share Christmas with another family, the kids played while the adults got to chat (mostly on cruising and boat related topics). Our Christmas lunch wasn’t the traditional Turkey my mom makes every year, stuffed with her delicious stuffing, made with a savory you can only get from Newfoundland and my grandmother’s gravy recipe that my aunt makes for the family every year. I decided this type of meal would be a little too complicated for me to replicate on SeaSparrow, so I made a dish with more of a Caribbean flare, shrimp pasta. Our friends from Enigma, brought a delicious rice salad and for desert we had more pastries from that little French bakery. Everyone seemed to enjoy the meal, as everyone went back for seconds.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

It was a different Christmas, it wasn’t the white Christmas that we were used to, but we made it into our own version of a Caribbean Christmas, with a mix of our own traditions. Everyone seemed to have enjoyed it and after all it was merry and bright.