Christmas in Hungary

Christmas morning 2005. Celebrating in Budapest the birth of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ!

Christmas Eve spent with Shay's parents and our BSF team members. We enjoyed being together.
Shay's parents, Dave and Carolyn Beach, came to visit for Christmas. Here the "girls" are in a McDonald's near Vienna, Austria. We stayed a couple of days in Vienna celebrating Christmas and returned in time to celebrate Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in Budapest.
During the Christmas holidays, we bundled up and went into Budapest to visit the outside Christmas market. It was so cold that day! Alot of the booths have handmade Hungarian crafts and some booths have delicious food. A few days before Christmas, a live nativity was set up. Camels, donkeys, and actors portraying the characters of the Christmas story. We rejoiced to see Christmas celebrated this way!

Birthday Pictures

Happy 13th Birthday, Meredith! We love you and are so proud of you!


13 Birthday candles to blow out! Look at all that fire!

Decorating for Christmas

Here's a picture of the girls decorating their own Christmas tree upstairs in our house. They decided to pick out their own tree and put some of their decorations on it. Guess what color they decided to use as their main color? Purple!! Purple? For Christmas?? Oh well, to each her own. Maybe one could argue that purple is the color of royalty and we are celebrating the birthday of the King!

Most Hungarians don't put up their Christmas tree until Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve is a huge family day where they gather for a big meal and decorate the tree together. So the American custom of putting up a tree early in December is very different to this culture. Let us know some of your Christmas traditions. We would love to know how your family celebrates the birth of Jesus.

The Christmas Season Begins

The closest we've been to a white Christmas was a Christmas Eve dusting of snow we experienced in Alabama one year. Even last year with our first Christmas in Budapest, there was no snow. A very unusual thing we're told. This picture shows a recent snow we had in Budapest and maybe we'll wake up to a white Christmas this year. Hope your Christmas season is filled with the joy and hope you have in Christ Jesus!

A Time To Sing

Open the eyes of my heart, Lord
Open the eyes of my heart,
I want to see You
I want to see You.

Olivia and Meredith had a wonderful opportunity, recently at church, to share in worship by singing the song, "Open the Eyes of My Heart." They were asked by one of the worship leaders to sing something during the offertory time. It was really good timing for them to sing since they had just returned from the states with new music in hand. While there, they spent some time with Jan Fincher, their former music teacher. She helped the girls pick out several selections that they could use in ministry here in Budapest. We were so proud of Olivia and Meredith and they seemed to enjoy serving the Lord in this way. Curt and Shay are wondering where they got their musical talent! It wasn't from us!

Friends

Being in Budapest gives us so many opportunties to meet some terrific people. Our view of the world has definitely expanded and that's been a good thing. There are believers all over the world in missionary service and they're not all Americans! A revelation for us! :-) Here we are with the Randimbiarison family--Jeannot, Julianna and their daughter, Tina. They serve with Pioneers. Jeannot is originally from Madagascar and Julianna is Hungarian. We have been so privileged to get to know them better and to serve with them. Their hearts are full of the love of Christ and love for His people.

Seated to Curt's left is Jarko and Elena Jurik. They are missionaries to Serbia and are very involved with our home church in Decatur (First Bible Church www.fbc.org) in church planting opportunities. Curt has visited Jarko and Elena in Serbia several times and have gotten to see their work first hand. Serbia is a very dark place, spiritually, and the Juriks are giving their life and energy to bring the gospel here.

We were able to spend some time with these two families during a conference held in a local hotel in Budapest.

Please continue to pray to the Lord of the harvest that He will raise up missionaries from all nations and to all nations.

Another Holiday In Hungary

We are constantly confused about the holidays here in Hungary. We just don't know when they happen! Well, maybe we know the main date of the holidays but we still don't understand the system of when people attach extra days on to the holiday. For example, today is All Saints Day in Hungary. It's a national holiday! Everything is closed. We did see that Burger King opened a little later than usual. But most all things were closed. Since the holiday fell on a Tuesday, a lot of Hungarians took yesterday off from work. They will work this coming Saturday in order to have the 4 day weekend. Makes sense. We would probably do the same thing in the states. But in talking with some Hungarians at BSF this morning, we were told that next year might be totally different. This holiday will fall on a Wednesday and they thought that most Hungarians would just be off on Wednesday--not any other day. So it makes for interesting decisions concerning the BSF class calendar. Do we meet or do we not meet? We just decided that we would continue class and did decide to meet today on the national holiday. We had a remarkably good turnout so it was a good decision. We'll probably just have to take the calendar year by year and try to figure out when these holidays will affect BSF. The next big holiday is Christmas and we'll be off from BSF during that time. Then there's another national holiday on March 15. We'll just have to wait and see how that affects our class!

Curt and Shay

We have been married for 23 years. Both of us graduated from Decatur High School and then went to separate colleges. We dated for four years and then were married in 1982. We have lived most of our lives in the North Alabama area.
A few years after we were married, Curt began a small trade show exhibit design company called Southern Convention Services. It is currently located in Madison, Alabama. God has blessed this company by bringing wonderful people to work there and for allowing it to help support us while we're on the mission field.
Shay worked for several years in the business world before becoming a stay-at-home mom when Olivia was born. Soon after Meredith was born, we began praying about the possibility of homeschooling both girls when the girls were older. The decision was made to begin this journey of home education and we are currently in our 11th year of this adventure.
In 2002, we believed that God was calling us into full time Christian ministry as missionaries. After almost a year in prayer, we made a public commitment in March 2003 to this call. Through a series of events, we decided that Bible Study Fellowship was the organization that we would serve with in overseas missions. Bible Study Fellowship trained us to be "class planters" for BSF in Budapest, Hungary. The hope is that a ladies and a men's class will eventually be thriving in this city.
The Brannons have been in Budapest for a year and a half and we are continuing to learn how to live in a foreign culture. God has graciously provided a very comfortable home, many new friends, and opportunities for the girls to be involved in ministry, too. Recently, a ladies' BSF class has begun and we are praying for growth in that class-numerically and spiritually.

Feel free to contact us through our family email address: brannons@scsonline.com We would love to hear from you!

A New Blog Site For The Brannons

The Brannon crew is playing around with a new blog site that would allow us to post pictures and other fun things to our blog. We really do think that blogs are the "way to go" in keeping people updated with what we're doing on this side of the world. At the risk of boring you to death, we hope to post regularly some of our daily activities! We're just a normal family like you. We just happen to live in another country. This picture was taken outside our home in Budaors, Hungary. Left to right, that's Tessa our new toy poodle, Meredith, Olivia, Shay, and Curt. Not included in the picture is our other dog, Zsani, and our big orange tabby, Sydney. On the next blog, we'll "introduce" each member of the family and give you some background on each member. Thanks for reading our blog!