Holiday! Part Two: The Party

Christmas “Eve” At Cassidy’s

A few of you lucky ducks know the kind of Christmas Eve celebration my mama throws, and I’ve gotta say, it just didn’t seem like Christmas to me without coordinating some sort of night-before-Christmas get together. So, four Fulbright out-of-towners...and 17 more guests later...we had ourselves a PARTY! Fabulous food, drinks, a white elephant exchange, even more carols, and one supremely overcrowded one-bedroom apartment made me feel pretty darn at home this night before night before Christmas.

Putting my house guests to work gutting pomegranates and choppin' apples.
(I like Rebecca's look of disgusted protest. Aww...) 

Aaand Max. Sittin' on my couch.
Refusing to help because I made him hold all the
pinecones I picked up while walking on campus with him.
Bitch please, someone's got an aesthetic vision here. Hellooo. 

The table. Most of the food (not pictured: super potato soup simmering on my stove and ALL the desserts) arrived from the blessed kitchen of Kelsey, The Chef's Daughter (no joke--and she's good too). But those little bread discs on the right there? Definitely put an order in at my corner pide place for those special soup bread babies, just like a true-blue Turkish mama! Proud moment.

A bunch of people not sitting in any of the chairs I gathered for the purpose of hosting a party...

More love for my musician buddies!

We also celebrated our speaking coordinator/homegirl Ceyla's birthday at the Christmas shindig!
Here she is receiving a too-perfect-to-have-planned piece of literature during the white elephant exchange.
(She's newly engaged--it's funny.)

So many shoes! Plus Wally Bey and Kathleen (leaving early--boo). Fun story about all those shoes: though it's the cultural norm in Turkey to leave your shoes outside your apartment, it's not okay in our apartment complex. But our guests didn't know that. So, next morning, we're gettin' ready to head downstairs and my house guests' shoes have been stolen--by Veyli the handyman. I had to run down five flights of stairs and out into the courtyard to plead for their return. Though Veyli just about gave me a heart attack when he simply said "çöp" (trash) in response to my panicked miming of shoes disappearing, he did end up revealing the secret stolen shoe hiding place in a storage closet.