Christmas at Lake Bacalar Mexico

Yes, I’m blogging about Christmas. I am only about 5 months behind…not bad…right?

We left Cancun on Christmas Eve and started heading down towards Lake Bacalar. We arrived at nightfall, and found our friends from Live Deliberately once again. They were staying at a campground right on the beach of Lake Bacalar. They treated us with their traditional cheese fondue Christmas-Eve dinner (with expensive American-style cheddar cheese!).

Then the kids treated us to the most delightful Christmas Eve ever. The Live Deliberately crew is comprised of five children, most which are very musically inclined. They teamed up with our kiddos and acted out a nativity for us to watch by only the light of a flashlight. Ella was the light/star, and they all sang a beautiful song about Mary that they knew from church. It was reverent, magical, and very touching. 

The next day (Christmas Day!) we attended church, and gave the girls some simple, small Christmas gifts. We don’t do Santa, since we made the decision years ago that we want Christmas to be more about Christ, than about gifts.

We spent the rest of the day relaxing beach-side of the most beautiful lake we have ever seen!

I failed to mention that on Christmas Eve we set up our tents at the same campground as our friends, which meant that although we had a great view, we had noisy Mexican neighbors from the lot next door, who couldn’t be shut out through the thin fabric of our tent. Mexicans love to party, and Christmas Eve is no exception. In fact, even Christmas morning was no exception…and we had to endure loud, often profane, music for a quite awhile.

 The campground had a nice communal kitchen that we were able to cook in.

We spent Christmas night in our tent as well, and the next day we all enjoyed the lake. Lake Bacalar is also known as The Lake of Seven Colors. It deserves its name. It’s water literally looks like the Caribbean Ocean, but it is a fairly shallow, fresh-water laguna. It was so clear that I felt we were swimming in a huge bathtub!

Look how clear that water is!

After two nights in the tent, Jared was ready for more comfort. I personally don’t mind camping, but I sleep through a lot. Jared can be a light sleeper, and he was ready for some comfort again. We located a nice studio rental room right on the lake, with this in the backyard:

Catfish were plentiful, although we didn’t fish!

We stayed on Lake Bacalar for a total of seven nights, making it officially the longest time we have ever stayed in one area on a vacation road trip.  Jared is a mover, and I can count on one hand the number of times we have ever stayed in one place more than one night (3 nights is our previous record!). More posts on Bacalar to come…