Brian (left speck) and Juliane (right speck) on their skidoos driving to the ice fields this morning with the sky trying to fool us into believing it is made of the same material as the snowy ground. 

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to y’all!! We wish you a very merry, cozy, and happy holiday season. Who knew that I had to travel to the end of the world to experience my 1st white Christmas through and through!!!! And I’m extremely excited about it. We are having a wotnderful Christmas time here in Antarctica. Granted, the 24 hour daylight makes it a bit hard to get into the Christmas spirit. But nevertheless we are having a great time and started our 2-day Christmas celebration yesterday (24th) since some of us on the team are German (me) and in Germany Christmas is celebrated on the 24th. So yesterday we blasted German and American Christmas music in the science tent while Brian cooked a fabulous Christmas dinner for us: chicken parmesan with penguin-shaped pasta. Delicious, but the very best was the dessert! He made and served us home made vanilla ice cream. Here is the recipe: 1/2 can of sweetened condensed milk (unfrozen if possible), 1 pack of vanilla pudding powd er, and lots of “fluffy” snow (luckily we had bad weather with lots of snow and drifting snow yesterday, so getting loose snow -loose snow is really more like tiny ice crystals that have not been compacted yet- was not a problem. Mix everything together and enjoy!! It was the best ice cream I ever had. I’m secretly hoping Brian has more ingredients for more ice cream in store so we can repeat this soon-ish. Today we were greeted with weather that was a bit better than yesterday and eager as we were we decided to go out and recover some Christmas meteorites. We drove to some ice fields that had been searched in 1995. The view was spectacular. The sky on the other hand decided to become the same color as the surrounding snow and ice and we had very diffuse light. We could not see any contrast or topography on the snow such as the disastrous sastrugi which will tip the skidoos over if hit at a wrong angle. And so we crept slowly one after the other over the snow towards those ice fields. Our fearless mountaineer Brian led us safe and sound to them. We searched some blue ice and then went Christmas meteorite hunting in the moraines. Total outcome today: 19. On our way back, Antarctica showed us the Beast again, the sky got even more diffuse and gray-white colored, the wind picked up, and it started to snow. We began our creepy-crawly drive back to camp, one after the other behind Brian, trying to follow the skidoo tracks in front of us to not get lost. We made it and are happily in our tents warming up – or trying to at least. Tonight we will have another fabulous Christmas dinner that Barb is preparing -it smells delicious in our tent right now: we will have grilled chicken de Provence with green beans, stuffing, and grilled potatoes. Cant wait!