Christmas 2013

Christmas in Italy

A week or so before Christmas we went on a shopping trip to Centro Milano.  

Here is a picture of an outdoor sidewalk cafe where they have totally enclosed it and installed heaters inside. Many of the side walk cafes have no seating inside.  Some of them the Kitchen is downstairs of the building next to it.

Here is the Duomo in all of its grandeur with a gigantic Christmas tree in front.  Very impressive.

There was a Christmas market with vendor stalls all around the sides and back of the Duomo.  Here is one selling candied fruit.

And another one selling bread and sweets

I had to take a picture of these wooden ducks with boots.  Very cute.  I love them.

At the mall and supermarket they even had a Santa Claus!  It was great watching the kids.

Christmas eve the Office elders were very excited.  One of them had made a home made version of Settlers of Catan.  They were having a great time!

Here is our office tree with all of the gifts under it.

Christmas morning Peggy made Cinnamon Rolls.  We ate them and then opened up our presents.

Peggy made the elders socks sewed together like a pair of little long johns.  They loved them!  We also gave them each a box of popcorn, a box of Master Crunch cereal (the best cereal I have ever had.  It is only sold at Lidl - a German grocery store.  It is a granola type cereal with chunks of chocolate in it!) , and some chocolate straws (straws with little beads of chocolate or srtawberry flavor in them so that when you drink your milk through it, it turns it into Chocolate milk!)

One of the gifts the elders gave us was this little Christmas Angle wrapped in 6 amazon boxes.

We saw these at the large supermarket.  They are Bufanas.  The Christmas witch that visits you if you have been bad.