Christmas here in Belgium and especially for us cyclo cross riders equals racing. Ever since the last worldcup in Namur the 18th. of December, racing has been the major event during Christmas. The worldcup in Namur gave me my spirit and good mood back, and I once again started to look forward to this big pile of race. After Namur I did the surhuisterveen and my first ever SP in Diegem, which was such a fun race in the middle of the center of Diegem. After Namur the legs feels better again, and I started looking forward to the next worldcup in Zolder, which I have done 3 times before.
But before all the action with another WC takes place, we had an amazing christmas dinner with Vicki and Marc. I have been living with Vicki for about 1½ month now, and I'm really sad that she has to go home, not because that I'm once again alone down here. It's more the fact that I really like living with her. We kind of have the same crazy sense in humor and we like doing things, seeing new places and experience basically everything new and interesting. 
The 24th.of December the 4 of us went to Bergen op Zoom, which is a nice city in Holland, just at the border. We walked around for hours, and spend some good quality time in the Hopmanns bike store, and brought home some chicken for our Christmas dinner. It has been a tradition, during the last 3 years I have spent Christmas in Belgium, that we make for the Danish people the "Risalamande", which is a kind of rice pudding mixed together with whipped cream and almonds. Normally you would make the whipped cream with a hand mixer, but the house I stay in doesn't have one... So for the third year in a row, we did it by hand.... yes... it only takes something like one hour, but it's possible and durable!!!
We had good dinner, with crackers, cheese, pate, chicken, salades you name it! It was great, and I really enjoyed it, but for the first time in years I actually missed my "normal" Christmas together with my family. We have our fun tradition with Santa and lighting the Christmas three... which is just our thing, that we do in my family...
After dinner (at 21:00) we went to the church in Blauberg. The service was very nice, they had like a brass band and a choir, so only thing you had to do was to listing to all the Flemish songs! After having hot chocolate and glüwein we went home to the dessert!
This wonderful day ended with us unpacking presents in the bed, looking at the amount of gifts that I got, I have been a "good" girl the year! or maybe I'm just spoiled...!!!
NB: the gifts in the pictures was not all for me, half was for Jacob.
Hope you all had a good Christmas either with family or good friends.
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