Christmas Eve

Traditionally, some families here in Nicaragua celebrate by having a midnight Christmas Eve dinner. Since midnight is a bit late for us, Candida agreed to have dinner ready around 10 or 10:30 (although we still didn’t get to bed until 2:30 am!). She made the traditional Christmas relleno (literally, the filling). It’s made with pork, chicken, tomatoes, potatoes, raisins, olives, mustard, Worcestershire sauce and other things. It sounds gross, but is actually one of the most delicious foods we have ever eaten. I hope to make it back in the US for our next Christmas. It is served with bread rolls, rice and salad.

My day started bright and early. I planned to make several desserts and a turkey for Roberto’s family. The menu included apple pie, lemon sponge pie, fannie hoover cookies, 7 layer salad, and turkey with stuffing (this year, I made it out of a box…I didn’t have time to make it from scratch like last year). This was the second time in their lives they had ever eaten turkey or apple pie…can you imagine?

Getting the gizzard out of the turkey


Jenny (Steve’s cousin) and Abby came over and spent the day at my house, helping to prepare the goodies. After a full day of chopping, rolling and baking, we headed over to Roberto’s house to await the arrival of Candida from work. While waiting for people to arrive, we all napped in turn…I don’t think I EVER took a nap at 8 pm before!

From left to right: Roberto, Simon and Hector share a joke.


As the family members slowly filtered in, everybody munched on the cookies and put the final touches on the relleno.



Around 10:30 we ate our fill, lit up some fireworks (a small incident occurred in which a spark landed on Nathaniel’s tongue, giving him a nice little white spot on the tip…he is fine now), ate some dessert and opened presents.
We finally headed home around 1:30. After all that excitement, I couldn’t go to sleep quite yet, so I stayed up and read a book until 2:30 and finally went to sleep.