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.
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| One party enjoying Christmas cookies |
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| If you know me, you know that the fact that I was able to make that many sugar cookies is nothing short of GRACE! |
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| 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. |
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| We actually found a Santa outfit and from time to time one of our students would ask to wear it! |
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| Sweet friends of mine. |
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| 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! |
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| D teaching our students "O Come All Ye Faithful". So much joy to hear them sing those words! |
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| Anna's favorite class. :) |
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| Outside our apartment during parties. D snuck out and took this one. :) |
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| You can't find wrapping paper in China, much less Christmas paper! We thought this gift a student brought was pretty great. :) |
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| So giddy! |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| A common cell phone holder. |
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| 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... |
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| 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. |
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| Our cozy apartment on Christmas morning! |
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| 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. |
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| Shopping is essentially nonexistent in our city, so little treasures found around town were our gifts to each other this year. |
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| 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! |
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| 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.
