Christmas break, what an enjoyable time of the year.

But spending this Christmas in  the Minnesota cold just made me be grumpy. I am the Spanish kid, and perhaps this grumpiness was expected of me. It was impossible for my host family to get me out of the house and I was glad that they didn’t push me forward. 13 days in a row below zero..seriously?

My family from Spain just kept texting me, they wanted to hear updates to see if I was alive or not. “Are you living with the penguins?”, they joked about the weather in  group chat.

As I said, no one could get me to leave the house, but the few times I went out was from the car to the grocery store and back. My host family just laughed at me because one day we went to a restaurant and I went to the car with a huge blanket covering me. I would love to make this a winter fashion trend so I could just go everywhere with my blanket.

On Christmas Eve I had dinner with my host family and exchanged presents which I am so grateful for, and on Christmas day we went to mass in the morning and then had a meal with my host family and all of their relatives there were so many people in the house.  You may thinkL Oh! did you feel excluded Yolanda?

Not at all, they made me feel like I was part of the family and that made me feel really happy and cheered me up.

For New Year’s Eve, one of the friend of my host sisters, Anna, invited me to her house.  We talked, played some board games and then waited for the ball to drop, but, as my luck would have it, the channel were we where watching the countdown went to ads when the ball was dropping and we missed the countdown… We all know by that how the year is going to turn out.

On a positive note, I am ready to do lots of reviews of Netflix shows for the Cotter Chronicle.

Spending your Christmas in a foreign country can teach you a lot and also make you value most your family, even though I spent a lot of my break under a blanket, it will always hold a special place in my heart.