Merry Christmas to all, and to all, Baked Goods!!

Well, here we are, Christmas in two short days, and it can't come fast enough. We are closing the shop for Christmas Day, and honestly, we could all really use the break. Between setting up the shop here, trying out systems and recipes, and setting up the shop in Greater Noida in Honey Money Top (a grocery store), we have been going non-stop for weeks now, barely getting time enough to sleep. The Boys come in at three in the morning, and bake all the breads and pastries for the day, and are often here till as late as six in the evening. Anna and I arrive at eight or eight thirty in the morning depending how fast we find a rickshaw, and stay most nights until eleven preparing things for the Honey Money order the next day. It's a crazy life, but this is the way it will be until we can find reliable employees to open and close shop for us so we can leave at a reasonable hour. Thus far we have gone through two full time front end employees, both of which came and worked for two days and didn't return on the third. The fellow we have at the moment, Pintu, is only part-time, but works hard and is fairly punctual and very loyal. He used to be one of the street kids at the community center near our house, but has since grown up, cleaned himself up and got an apartment with some friends and is going to school and works here. He's a great guy. So far it seems as though everyone we hire that has some sort of degree or lots of experience turns out to be a bit of a bust, so we are now just going for former street kids or villagers who live here in the city and send their money home to their families. They are loyal hard workers, and tend to learn quickly as well.

As Christmas draws closer I am reminded of what Christmas is really about. Although consumerism is as much of an epidemic here as at home, the mad rush to get everyone piles of things that they don't need and will never use isn't quite as prominent. There is a mad rush like that at all times anyway. The only Christmas lights I have seen so far besides the ones in our front window and on the Christmas tree at home are at the Holy Family Hospital down the way form our house. It was started by Catholics I believe, and they have some lights up. So without the millions of coloured lights, hundreds of Santas ringing bells on street corners, gift wrap and bows being sold out in every shop, and thousands of Fathers out on Christmas eve attempting to scrounge the bare shelves of the local toy store in a last minute attempt to finish their Christmas shopping, it just doesn't feel like the holidays. So I guess when you take all that away, you are left with the original meaning of it all. I look around at all the dark faces and think to myself that Jesus was born just 3500km west of where we are right now, and that he might have looked a bit like some of these people do. His house may have been similar to some of those I have seen, and he probably worked much harder than the millions of people I see every day sitting at the side of the road watching people drive by for hours on end. And his smile was probably just as radiant as the ones I see on the faces of the street children that we give our day-old baked goods to. His hair was probably all dusty like theirs too, and he probably had dirt and mud caked on his bare toes like them too. But I bet he didn't say "praise Jesus!" when someone gave him a loaf of bread. I bet you his laugh was just as contagious as theirs though! I like the Christmas season even more now, not because of the gifts and decorations, but because it reminds me of my savior, the one who was once a child like the ones we play with in the streets, unspoiled and without great wealth to blind him from reality. Possibly a dirty but happy kid who is content to play with a chunk of wood on the end of a string or a pile of rocks for days, and never get bored of them. It makes me smile, and it makes him all the more real.

So despite the madness, tiredness, and all of us being completely overworked, Christmas day will be a day of rest and feasting. We plan on getting all dressed up and going with a few friends to a five star hotel where they have turkey. Hopefully the usual turkey hangover won't be too bad! Or else the boys' three o-clock shift will be a mighty tough one.

I apologies for not having any pictures to go along with this entry, but I don't have the cable for my camera here, and Dave and Anna's camera is dead and without the power cord to re-charge it. I'll see if I can post some pics of the staff and the finished Bakery in a few days.

Have a very Merry Christmas all of you, we miss you greatly, and look forward to when we can see all of your beautiful faces once again.

Cookies for the lovely, and the wicked.

I believe I can now officially say that The Bakery is complete. Everything is functional, wait… not it’s not, I lied. The small gas stove works all right, but it has a bad gas leak at one of the welds. So the people who supplied it will be coming tomorrow to fix it. But despite the various setbacks, we managed to get a couple batches of cookies, a few kinds of bread, and butter tarts baked! Nearly all the ingredients have arrived, and the shelves are stocked with everything necessary to make cookies, breads, pastries, and pies. It all feels more real and possible now, that we may be actually providing the neighborhood with delicious baked goods in a week or so. We put together cute little bags of the cookies we made, and gave them out to our fellow shops in the complex. Some didn’t even know we were here, (where they have they been, we don’t know, cuz we’ve made enough noise and hey, we’re white…) and some were overjoyed to be amongst the privileged few who got to taste test the very first batches of cookies to ever come out of Red Moon Bakery. But alas, as we have found out over the last few days, nearly everyone in this area is a strict vegetarian. That means no egg. So the cookies may have just been tossed, but heck, it's the thought that counts right? Those are the cookies for the lovely.

The cookies for the wicked were for our neighbors, J.I.T.I. It must be an acronym for something evil, we don’t know what, but you can make it up for yourselves and get back to us as to what you think it should be. It’s a computer training place, and draws a good amount of young people to our end of the complex. We are happy about this because it is potentially great clientele. The owner is psycho though. One day he is all friendly and happy-go-lucky, and the next he threatens to rip apart our signs at night so that he can put his where ours are. He had a giant sign for his place on our front wall, and we had it taken down to put our sign up. It is our wall, we are allowed to do whatever we want with it. Apparently he wasn’t thrilled about this. We gave him a few days to take it down himself, and when he didn’t, we did. It is still fine, there is no damage to it, and he can easily put it up somewhere else. But we gave them a bunch of cookies anyway. “Love your enemies,” right? “and it will be like heaping hot coals on his head.” Or something to that effect. Not the exact words, I know. So now (as you can see from the picture at the beginning) his sign is leaning against the wall beneath ours. Not the greatest, but at least our signs are still intact.

From now onward we will be working here at various different things at nearly every hour of the day. Marc and Dave will most likely be here from 3:00am to 12pm or so, and Anna and I probably from 8:00am to... whenever we can't go on. Maybe 5:00pm, maybe 8:00 pm. I don't know yet. These are the uniforms. I have a black golf shirt type one with a red moon logo stitched over the pocket, and a little black half apron with the logo embroidered down the side. This will be the front-end staff get-up. Marc is in the bakers uniform, complete with a black bandana. Pretty cute huh?

Here are a few more pictures of the action around this crazy place, and some of the goods that are being tested.

There you be. All relatively self explanatory. I am now going to create a Red Moon Bakery blogspot. It will be http://www.redmoonbakery.blogspot.com/. You can check it out, and any feedback is appreciated. My posts will definitely be getting fewer and farther between due to the whole working factor, so if you don't see anything for a week and a half and you are getting worried, facebook me. Wish us luck, and pray for our sanity and against sleep deprivation!

Hmm...odd.

Something seems to have gone a bit wonkey with this thing... I have it still set at anyone can publish a comment, but for some reason it is saying that you must have a blogger account. I apologize for this inconvenience, and will try to amend it as soon as possible. As for those cats you can jeep for tren years, they need to learn how to read through their posts before publishing them.