Christmas Feast

Most of the people who had traditionally gone up to help with the Christmas Feast on the Rez are still in school out of town, trying to finish up finals and get home for break. Instead, the youth leader who has driven up almost every Tuesday for years ended up with me, a high school senior, and his mom - none of whom had ever made it to a Christmas feast.

Granted, I've been up enough to times to not be a complete stranger, and J has been going as often as he can for at least the last three years, but it was the first time his mom had ever been up to the Rez. She did awesome, though.

We walked in tons of circles serving the food, (Everything is served counterclockwise in the longhouse, so, if you need to get a pie to the table that is at the one o'clock position, you have to enter at the twelve o'clock spot and walk all the way around to one - no matter how many legs and bodies are in between. :D) washed dishes, bagged leftovers for people to take home, watched the pageant, sang carols, helped the kids with their presents, and gathered up garbage afterward.

At one point, I looked out over the room of 400+ people, many/most of whom do not claim to be Christ followers, with the smell of smoke and salmon and venison heavy in the air, and it struck me how similar this "Christmas" was to the way we spent Christmas last year.

The two tribes are so very, very different, and, at the same time, there are things about the cultures that are very, very much the same.

Either way, they have both wormed their way into a ridiculously special place in my heart, and the same God desperately loves them both - which is reason enough for me.