David's birthday and a different kind of Christmas

We hope you had a very merry Christmas!

The past three weeks or so have been very, very busy but oh, so good! It all started right around David's birthday (Dec. 7), which we never shared pictures or updates about. Email and blog updates kind of take a back seat when times get crazy!

We celebrated David's birthday with our team at Pizza Hut, which is a big treat here. It's expensive for our city and is pretty close to real pizza. On his actual birthday we were really busy with classes and meetings with students, but I managed to make him his favorite western meal for dinner, poppyseed chicken! Definitely something I will only do every once in a while since something like that takes forever here, but it was such a treat and tasted pretty good, too!

Then last week we started to prepare for finals in our classes. Our last final was given Christmas Eve. We are now officially finished with class meetings but have a pretty hefty stack of finals, rubrics, and essays to grade! We are really looking forward to this time though because our students will still be here until the second week of January, so we can have meetings with them and hang out and have no class. There are also other local friendships and relationships we are hoping to work on outside of our students during this time of no classes or lesson planning.

Our Christmas season was wonderful and very different than any kind of Christmas we have ever had before. We were given the advice a while ago by a friend who also serves in here to do a different Christmas. Do everything different; don't try to make your mom's chicken, your grandma's cake, your same Christmas Eve traditions...create something all new. David and I have a lot of established traditions we have had since we got married, and at first I was hesitant to take her up on her advice, but we did and oh, what wisdom in that.

So we had a different Christmas. Not different in a bad way or even a good way, but just different! We have been seriously amazed at how different Christmas feels when it's stripped of the commercialism, glitz and glamour, and hype. Here in China, it was just another day. Christmas is not celebrated here so it was business as usual all around us. The world wasn't still or quite or magical around us this year. We couldn't find Christmas decorations easily, no Christmas drinks or cookies, no music playing in stores or strangers with smiles on their faces. "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...." never happened this year. But we found that when Christmas is stripped of all those things, it has a really beautiful simplicity about it. We clung to advent and the hope that it brings. We loved sharing Christmas and why it is celebrated with our students. We loved teaching them "O Come All Ye Faithful" and share why Christmas matters so much to us. We loved making them their first Christmas cookies or giving them their first Christmas gifts. We loved teaching them "dirty santa" and the laugh-until-you-cry moments when a quiet classmate would steal a gift from another when they least expected it. We wouldn't trade these memories or moments for anything. We really felt a deeper bond with students after sharing a Christmas season with them. We hosted six parties in our home for six different classes of ours, with about thirty people at each one. Crammed into our apartment, our hearts were so full.

One party enjoying Christmas cookies

If you know me, you know that the fact that I was able to make that many sugar cookies is nothing short of GRACE!

Chinese do not wear shoes in the house (a part of Chinese culture that I love!) so when hosting one must provide enough slippers for all your guests. I loved seeing their little matching slippers all around our living room. :) Full apartment, full hearts.

We actually found a Santa outfit and from time to time one of our students would ask to wear it!

Sweet friends of mine.

Wrapped gifts are not given at all for any holidays in China, other than maybe the occasional wrapped birthday gift but that is rare. So our students LOVED the act of opening presents! We had to tell them it's OK to tear the paper!

D teaching our students "O Come All Ye Faithful". So much joy to hear them sing those words!

Anna's favorite class. :)

Outside our apartment during parties. D snuck out and took this one. :)

You can't find wrapping paper in China, much less Christmas paper! We thought this gift a student brought was pretty great. :)

So giddy!

The gifts students brought are so, so, SO different from anything that we would buy in the States. It was hilarious and fun to see what they came up with and what gifts were the most popular and would get stolen often in the dirty Santa game- oftentimes a snow globe or a stuffed animal were big hits.

This was a dog on a stick. It made whimpering sounds when you would hit people with it. Chinese use these to hit muscles that are sore. These were popular gifts.

A common cell phone holder.

The Chinese are big gift givers. They love to give, give, give. This taps into my love language and I love giving them gifts too. These little bears on sticks are popular hostess gifts. I ended up with a few of them...

We attended a local fellowship's packed out Christmas Eve service. It was all in Chinese, but really neat to hear them singing passionately and see how these services are done in a different country and context.

Our cozy apartment on Christmas morning!

After David and I shared our Christmas together, we exchanged gifts with our team. We spent the whole day together and it was a really sweet time. We are grateful for a team that functions more like a family.

Shopping is essentially nonexistent in our city, so little treasures found around town were our gifts to each other this year.

A teammate got D a scarf from the Changchun soccer team. We hope to make it to a game next year, since it's only a 30 minute train ride away!

Strategy board games, western food, and Les Miserables with our team on Christmas. It was such a fun day!

 Many of you have asked what our winter break looks like from here on out. China's school year is different than the States'. Here, they have two months off in the summer (July & August), and two months off in the winter (January and February), with no spring or fall breaks in between. We will be finishing grading finals and wrap up meeting with students until they take their last finals before going home for the Spring Festival holiday, which is their version of Christmas here. It's huge. Everyone goes home and cities shut down for it. It is celebrated for over a month's time, in which we will be traveling for our company's annual conference. We are looking forward to a much needed time of rest and rejuvenation so we can come back energized and ready for a strong second semester. We plan to do a lot of language learning, resting, and meeting with local friends whose hometown is here and will not be traveling for the holidays.

Petition request

We are in without doubt the busiest time in the semester! We have Christmas parties we are hosting almost every night in our home, preparing for finals next week, and trying to fit in last minute meetings with students before they all go home for the Spring Festival holiday!

You might have seen on the news, but China has had some extremely high pollution across the country in recent days. It didn't hit our city until three or four days ago, but now that it's here, it's REALLY here and really heavy. David started feeling bad last Thursday and I woke up yesterday feeling bad. This has happened every time the air quality hits a major low- which is the third time since we moved here. As we muster up energy to finish well (caffeine is a dear friend) and sport our masks around town, please remember us. We feel yucky and are exhausted from being sick.

Thank you! Update with pictures from recent parties will come soon!

A White Thanksgiving

We hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We enjoyed hosting our team plus a few extras, including our FAO (foreign affairs officer), Steve, and his wife, Emma. They are blessings to us and we loved having the opportunity to serve them and spend time with them in good and meaningful conversation. (Side note: Shout out to both of our moms for sending Thanksgiving decorations! 100% of our seasonal decorations have come from them! Thank you!!)

 

 Last week we held a potluck dinner for our fellow Chinese colleagues. This was a really great time to get to know them better and form deeper relationships. There is very little interaction opportunities for us with the other teachers so this was really helpful. They all loved it and stop us in the whole to say how much they loved it. The concept of potluck is foreign to them and they really loved the concept!

The past few weeks have been rich and full of significant conversations and relationships that have gone deeper. We have so many friends we are asking for...please ask for them with us.

A message Anna received from a student on Thanksgiving...guess we know what we will cover next year in our lesson the week before Thanksgiving!

The snow has been here for about 3 weeks now! Temps are ranging in the single digits and teens Farenheit. We are loving it so far! We'll see how long it takes for that to wear off. :) It sure is beautiful though!

A Broader Look into the Work

Hi all! Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and we are asking the Father to draw us all into a recognition of the incredible grace we have to be thankful for. We have the privilege of being in a position to freely love and freely forgive. What incredible peace that brings.

This post is short because we thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to a website that gives a broader look into the life we live here. We live in a "small town" here but are on a large City Team that includes a city to our north with about 5-7 million people. Our city team created a site for writing articles about life here and what we are doing. The most recent article is actually one that David wrote. It is a great way to see what is going on all around our city team. The website usually has to do with cultural experiences or classroom teaching insights for the sake of security, but we hope you all will check it out! You can find the site here.

Time well spent

I wanted to share something that has really made a huge difference in our lives recently. It's nothing ground breaking or new. It's as old as time itself, actually. It's a matter of rest.

For the first few months here, we were so excited and giddy to hit the ground running. We had anticipated and pursued this opportunity for so many years, we were more than ready when the door finally opened. We ran and ran and started wearing ourselves out quickly. Thankfully, before hitting a wall or having a breakdown of some kind, we decided to take seriously a day of rest. We taught, and met with students, and lesson planned, and kept up with family and friends, all the while trying to figure out life here. So a few weeks ago, we set aside a day to just be. To be at home, be who we were created to be- for me it is creating through sewing, for David it is contemplating through reading. We made hot chocolate and watched a movie. It was so refreshing and renewing to my heart that I just cried at the end of the day.

My mom always said that I love to live life so much that I suck every minute out of every day. I would stay outside playing when I was little as late as my parents would let me. I love people and experiences and a life full of the two. So living overseas and making intentional relationships...even better. I'm the one who will get up early and stay out late in a new city just to get in as much exploring as possible. For our first few months here, the average day was filled with two meals a day with students, classes, and planning or emails in between. I filled our schedule with people until our time was all used up. Preserving time with Him and with David, I figured that that was enough to keep me going. But I learned quickly that I need time to rest. To acknowledge my humanness and limited abilities.

So I made a list. I made a list of Do's and Don't's. Not obvious things like "I do time with Him" or "I do laundry." But things that I will prioritize with my time, when it feels like so many other things fight for it. I'll give you some examples. I do life in China. I do flexiblity, I do new foods, I do language learning. I do relationships with students. I do create. I do take time to keep up with those deep, long distance relationships with my inner circle that I need so desperately.

More importantly is the Don't list. This one is more important, because instead of making myself feel guilty or feeling thoughts of "I should do this..." or "I should try that sometime...", I just call out things that are not important to me personally and I will not spend my time on it. Here are a few: I do not bake. (I will never be one of those moms who make their kids birthday cakes..nope.) I do not spend a lot of time on social media. I do not compare my life with others. I do not follow TV shows. I do not pressure myself to cook at home (another thing that has changed since moving here).

Of course, these are tailored to me and my life. The lists are very extensive and specific. They really help me to make choices with using the time He has given me. Every day has so many choices. For a goer and a doer like me, clear options for how to spend my time has made such a huge difference and really improved our life here. I wanted to share this idea with you if you are like me or you have a hard time saying NO. (Been there, been that!) So here's to using the time He graciously given us to the best of our abilities!

-A

A Chinese Halloween

Happy Halloween to all! As you all prepare for an evening of vampires, ghosts, ninjas, zombies, X-men, and the occasional Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama, we wanted to let you know that we celebrated Halloween in style ourselves!

Every year, the foreign English teachers put on a Halloween party for all the Freshman English students. We learned that this party has become one of the most anticipated events of the entire school year for students. As one of our veteran teammates told us, "Your students will literally talk about this one party for their entire college career after they have gone to it." In fact, it is so popular that we have to print off non-duplicatable tickets so that only our Freshman students can get in. Apparently, in the past, students from all departments in the school try to get in and it becomes unmanageable for the teachers.

We spent the entire week preparing for the party by purchasing so much candy at the supermarket that we received the "crazy stares" from passing customers. We planned out the layout of the party, and had our LAs (library assistants) and several sophomore and junior volunteers help us for it. We were given 3 large classrooms to use for the party. 1 classroom became a haunted maze which I (David) worked the whole night. Another classroom was the craft room where we had face painting, jack-o-lantern drawing, and ghost crafting done which Anna worked. The final room was our game room where we had "eye ball" toss (a bunch of white ping pong balls we turned into eye balls), a bat ring toss, and musical chairs.

The previous week's freshmen class that we had was a lesson on Halloween in order to teach them a little about the holiday beforehand and to get them more excited about the party. It wasn't difficult to get them excited. They pretty much did that all on their own. In fact, when Anna passed out the tickets to one of her classes, one of the boys in the class stood up and kissed the ticket. We also made as much emphasis as week could for them to come in costumes (which many of them did to our delight).

I have to admit, there is something quite rewarding about being able to scare the living daylights out of freshmen students in a haunted house one week and give them a test the next, haha!

As per the rumors of past parties, this one received as much mention as we had expected. After the party was over, WeChat (their version of Facebook) exploded with posts and pictures from the Halloween party. We also possibly took more pictures in this one evening than any other time I can recall.

We are definitely looking forward to doing this again next year. We hope that you all have a happy and sugar-induced Halloween there too!

Minnie Mouse and her beat up soccer beau.

Our teammate, Travis, came as a mummy, or as one student perceived.....an astronaut.

Anna with a portion of one of her classes. The student on the right is the one who kissed his ticket when he received it.

One of our fellow teacher's sons. Ironically, he really wanted the Captain America symbol and Anna delivered.

As soon as David started posing with scary faces, no student wanted him to smile for any picture.

Students lined up to take pictures with us. Felt a little bit like we were characters in the Magic Kingdom (which is funny considering Anna was Minne Mouse).

Another of Anna's classes there for the party!

Anna received a lot of gifts from students. This was a stuffed animal dog that is shaped so that you hug it in the middle of its body. Chinese refer to these as "boyfriend gifts". Thankfully it wasn't a boy that gave it to her.

Anna taught one of our LAs to facepaint too.

Students crammed into the craft room.

Musical chairs.

The director of the English Department came with her son. He came dressed as a wizard.

Several teachers came with their children. It felt like we were hosting a China Fall Festival at times!

One of the Chinese English teachers went all out in her Snow White outfit!

Two of our students took us to dinner the night after the party. This is a style of cooking in the Northeast called "dun" which means "stew". The center of the table is a wood-burning fire which heats the cast iron pot in the middle and you each right out of it. Might be the best food we've had in China yet!