The Hendersons in Himeji: Christmas at HBC

We feel so blessed to have found such a wonderful church here in Himeji. The pastor and his family have quickly become part of our family and we enjoy our time together on Sundays. The Sunday before Christmas was extra special as they had a baptism and we got to listen to the Children's choir sing a couple of our favorite Christmas songs. These little girls are so adorable and they have beautiful voices. Pastor Haruta shared the Chritmas story and we really enjoyed our time of fellowship with the members of Himeji Baptist Church. A couple days later went to the candlelight service. After the service we all stat around and ate Christmas cake, drank coffee and fellowshiped. Just as we got ready to leave a couple of the little choir girls, whom we have become fast friends with, decided they wanted us to help them decorate a cake in the kitchen. Haruko, the youth leader/interpreter informed us that they had bought a cake for the girls to decorate and that they wanted us to help. Audrey and I, of course were very flattered and looked forward to hanging out with these little ones. We had so much fun as we were able to use some of our broken Japanese and they practiced the English that Haruko would help them with. Thankfully, you don't really have to know the same language when it decorating cakes with little ones, we just kind of went at it. After the cake was decorated there was still a bag of icing that had not been used. Not wanting to be wasteful I grabbed the bag and started squirting some of the icing into my mouth. Now in my family there was rarely a time that we had whip cream in the house and one of us kids didn't grab the can, tilt our head back and fill our mouths with the fluffy goodness. After seeing the looks on these girls faces I'm not sure that they had ever seen anything like that before. I decided that I should share so I started offering it to them. The first couple girls were still taken aback by this crazy maneuver and they backed away really quickly, but one girl was ready! She cocked her head back, closed her eyes and opened her mouth about as wide at it could get. So I squirted a little frosting in there and she popped her head forward and closed her mouth and started to giggle. That moment was priceless. It was a moment of sheer ecstasy. Once the other three girls saw the look on her face they made a mad dash to be the next in line. All three followed suite... head back, mouth open, eyes closed and all three had the same look on their face as the sugar went down their throat and started coursing through their veins. It was awesome! After about 3 or 4 rounds of this, the frosting was gone, but I'm sure the sugar highs lasted well into the night. We each then ate our piece of cake, played for a little bit until Audrey and I headed home for bed and left their parents to deal with the aftershocks. All in all it was a great way to end the night. We feel so blessed to have made such wonderful friends here in Himeji and we will always cherish little memories like this.

The little angels singing