It Has Been a While

Grace and Greetings.

It has been a while since my last post, so I thought I had better get something up.

To answer the major question on everybody's minds, yes the sun has now set for the year. Though it set on November 18th, we still get some light for a couple of hours at the moment, but I am sure that will be gone too here soon.

The weather has not been that bad here, averaging between 15-25 degrees above. The fun is not the temperature itself, but the wind chill, with winds up to about 30 miles an hour. There was one day last week that got down to -15 then add the 15 mile an hour wind, and it was cold.

Thanksgiving here is a little different as well. The majority of the people gather at the church for a service on Thanksgiving day, then they have a feast. The feast is all traditional foods, starting with duck or caribou soup; fried bread; Eskimo ice cream, (whipped caribou fat with some meat in it); muktuk and of course the whale meat from the hunts earlier in the year. The whole church is prepared three days before the feast by having plastic sheets and cardboard covering ALL the floor space; people cook at home and then come to the church early in the morning and get ready to share the feast with all that show up. The service started at about noon, the feast started about one, and they were through serving people about 4:30. By 7 pm you would never had known that the feast had happened, except for the particular smells that come with the prepared food.

We will be having another feast this Christmas, but that involves a week long celebration between Christmas and New Year's Day.

Until next time, hopefully it will be MUCH sooner, thank you for sharing your time with me.

Peace and Blessings.

Ian