Christmas Eve in Angkor

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It's hard to sum up in a few words hundreds of years in the making. The temples of Angkor are old, really old. So old it seems almost wrong to let the kids jump and play and touch and scuttle through them, as though my child's touch might be just the force that will bring whole structures crumbling down. One temple we climbed through was from the 800s. That's old. I have loved Cambodia since my family took in two Cambodian refugees when I was growing up. Their families were killed by the Khmer Rouge and they fled to America. I have read in books since then of the devastation that impacted their lives so dramatically and have always had a curiosity about their land and people. Decades later, here I am with my own family. I love Siem Reap and wish we could spend some more time here. It's a surprisingly easy place to travel with children, especially my children with lots of temple-climbing energy. We joined up with friends from Singapore and their three kids. It was hot, humid, and sunny -- I loved it all. I'm seriously considering that I was born in the wrong hemisphere. Warm Christmases feel perfectly normal to me, especially after 5 years of them. We saw the usual stuff, including the magnificent Angkor Wat. It really was stunning, though the under 12s were disappointed not to be able to climb to the top. More that anything I enjoyed watching the children play. They already have such great memories of these amazing structures because of the games they played and the fun they had jumping and climbing all through them. It's hide-and-seek heaven. We also got a small taste of the real Siem Reap. We were able to serve morning porridge to local schoolchildren, thanks to some connections our friends had. Our kids really got into it, handing out bowls and greeting the kids. We took a boat out to a floating village -- an entire village on the water. We imagined what it would be like to have been born there, to grow up in a tall stilt house and take a boat to your floating school, floating pig farm, floating market, floating restaurant. We also dropped in for the LDS branch Christmas party and saw the nativity story as told in Khmer. Luckily we already knew the plot.We ate well, swam, wandered around, and was grateful again that our kids get to experience this. Whether they appreciate it now or not, the exposure they have had to other people and cultures and history is really the best Christmas gift we could have given them this year.