Our Christmas Story

Until about a week before the event, Christmas in Ghana was looking like a solitary event. Many of the foreigners we had known had left the country, either to return home or to visit. The Ghanaian family I have been close with for eight years was busy preparing for an upcoming wedding (post forthcoming) so weren't doing anything special. We had plans to visit some of our good Ghanaian friends and deliver a few presents, but otherwise it was just going to be T and I. Terry has been down lately. The double whamy of turning 30 and his first Christmas out of the country had really gotten to him. Our efforts to craft a connection to the meaningful traditions of our home focused, perhaps not surprisingly, on food.

We had decided that Christmas morning we would try to make cinnamon rolls. In my house growing up my mother often made cinnamon rolls for Christmas morning, always with orange frosting. Growing up these were the kind that came out of a tube, because they were easy to make in the midst of all the hubub. Of course, in Ghana, there are no ready-made tubes of cinnamon roll dough just waiting to be baked. I did research on the web. When I usually approach a new recipe, I like to look around and get a sense of the variety so I can better identify the proportions and items that most of the good looking recipes have in common. Thanks to my love of Alton Brown and some experimentation with yeast breads in the past, I was also equipped with a descent sense of what the different elements were doing for the final product. I had finally put together a recipe that I thought would be quite good.

Just one problem: we were going to have to "bake" them in a rice cooker.

We don't have an oven here. In desperation, I have discovered that you can bake banana bread in a rice cooker. It takes a little adaptation, but it can be done. I even made two different kinds. With no alternative in sight, it was looking like rice-cooker cinnamon rolls. They might be goopey or gooey or, at worst, pasty and inedible. But at leasst they would be good for a story and a laugh. We would remember "that Christmas in Ghana" when we baked in a rice cooker.

Instead, the generosity of near strangers made the season memorable for a completely different reason. Through another friend, we recently met a new group of folks who are North Americans (a few British) who are here for several years. They were warm and welcoming, and before the end of the night, they had invited us along to a Christmas Eve dinner and holiday service.

Dinner was a gathering of foreigners who were staying in Accra for the holidays. Our gracious hosts served amazing lasagna, garlic bread, and salad. For dessert it was warm apple pie, chocolate dipped peanut butter balls, and oatmeal cookies. Sitting in a room filled with the voices and sounds of thirty people, eating only by the light cast from the Christmas tree, it suddenly seemed like Christmas.

Afterwards we went to a Christmas eve service. We heard the traditional Christmas passages read. We sang traditional Christmas songs. Actually, the songs were all the British version, and who knew the Brits had totally different words. The experience was very much like being in a hiccup in the Matrix, where things are mostly right, but something is a little off. At the very end of the service we did a traditional candlelight ending. Candlelight while singing Silent Night is a wonderful way to close out an Eve service. But I will say it works considerably better when you don't have to turn the fans off and suffer 90 degree heat just so you can keep the candles lit.

After the service Terry and I were joking about our impending experiment with "rice cooker cinnamon rolls." The other expats invited us to join them at their home for a Christmas brunch. We brought along our cinnamon rolls, cooked them in the oven, and they turned out divine! After brunch, we all returned to the living room, where we basked in tree-light and exchanged gifts in a somewhat abusive system where each person has the opportunity to "steal" a previously opened gift.

After brunch, we returned home, and decided to head out to the Internet Cafe to try to contact friends and family back home via Skype. We went to our favorite hang-out, Frankies.

Frankies was full of dapper looking Ghanaians celebrating Christmas with a special meal out for the family. Near us sat four women, all dressed in their "sunday best" and nine children, almost all under the age of eight. Although it is at a restaurant, a long table lined with hopeful little faces has the inescapable impression of holiday and family. The smallest boy sits just near me. I can see his tiny black patent leather shoes glint as he kicks his feet back and forth. He has a navy colored satin vest on over a light blue button shirt. The button shirt collar is popped as though he is some college hipster, but he doesn't seem to notice or mind. He sits across from an absolutely beautiful seven year old girl, her hair carefully in plaits and then tied up in pig tails with ribbons. The girl occasionally looks over at me, both charming and shy, interested in me, the foreigner. Finally their food comes out. They are all enjoying Chicken and Fried Rice, which has become something of a Ghanaian national favorite in the last four or five years. The mothers aren't eating, just sipping soda and laying back, watching contentedly as the children dig in to this special Christmas treat.