posted by Julia
A normal Christmas: It is cold, sometimes rainy and everywhere people buy presents for Christmas and colourful lights are on the houses. At home we celebrate Christmas with the whole family, we sit around the fire place and play games and after church there is a nice dinner and after that we get our presents.
This year 48 people on the „Thor Heyerdahl“ celebrate Christmas in a very different way and for most of us it is the first time without our families.
We are in the Caribbean Sea in front of Grenada, it is approximately 30°C and around us there are palms and a lot of water. Before our Christmas party on the 24.12.2017 everybody got a person, how he/she has to make a present for (Secret Santa), it has to be handmade by themselves and we decided that everyone has to write a poem, as well.. Furthermore, we organized a kitchen duty, which included Luca, Marlene E., Tobi and me.
In the following I will describe the course of our evening because this is the thing what made our Christmas party so special.
On the day of Christmas we got out of the harbour at first and then we anchored at a place outside. At the same time, the kitchen duty made breakfast with eggs, pancakes, fresh fruits, punch, apple juice and the normal things. After breakfast our ship was made ready for the party by different groups e.g. the decoration team, the cleaning team, the entertainment team and some people did the last thing on their Christmas presents to get them ready. The coffee break was also a different one because we got biscuits made by Vicky and a really nice stollen (that typical German Christmas cake) made by Cajo. At 5pm our Christmas party officially began with an opening drink out of grenadine-syrup and orange juice. Then our choir sang a song, Kai read the Christmas story and Ruth hold a small speech and Detlef read out a funny poem. At 6pm the garlic creme soup was served and during the preparations for the Christmas dinner the whole crew sang Christmas songs together and Bene and Lea presented the Christmas story, which was adjusted to a marine environment. At 7:30pm the dinner started. At 8pm the dessert was served and during eating this someone yelled: ‚There is a unicorn on the water!‘ and on it was the baby Jesus (Vera). She came closer to the ship and got a place between us. She declared that the evening has come and that the presents are distributed to everyone now. She read out two names each time and these two got their presents and went in front of us to show us what they have got and read out their poem. After this long ceremony we all got a letter from our old cup numbers (remember, at the beginning of our journey, everyone got a number and uses the cup with that number), a very nice idea.
On this point our Christmas evening party ended, some of us still didn‘t want to go to bed. So we played werwolf on the „Ladeluke“. But after some time the tiredness won and the whole crew went to bed, but the anchor watch still stayed on the poop deck.
Finally it was a really nice and different Christmas party with our new family and it was great, I will never forget it.