Christmas in China 聖誕快樂

Christmas in China is a very low profile holiday.  Since it is an atheist country there aren’t a lot of decorations or anything, but we made it work! I had 2 classes in the morning/afternoon that went really well.  My little ones (4-9 year olds) were first in the morning.  We played lots of games: Mystery word, pin the nose on Rudolph, Santa relay (putting a balloon under their clothes) and musical chairs/statues.  They all had a really nice time! It was a little exhausting for me and my wonderful TA, Carol, but we managed.  My older kids (11-15 year olds) were in the afternoon; this was a little more exciting class.  When I first went up to set up my speakers and iPod, I got locked in my room!! The door has been sticking ever since it was fixed but we’ve always been able to open it.  But yesterday I went to open it to let students in & it was stuck.  It was fine, I was glad to be stuck by myself and not with 20 crazy kids, but still it wasn’t the most ideal situation.  It took the kids a few minutes to figure out that I wanted to to get an adult and that I was stuck.  Then they brought Shishi up, but she didn’t know how to open it.  After about 10 minutes she passed me a metal thing that I used to jimmy the door open.  The little thing that moves when you twist the handle wasn’t moving to I had to get that pushed it.  Then, of course, one of the kids closed the door again! But this time it took 5 seconds to open and I moved one of the big plants from the hallway in front of the door.  This class was really fun! We played Bingo (which they loved!), chubby bunny, pin the nose on Rudolph, they did a word search and the Santa relay.  All of us, Carol & myself included, had a really fun time. 

After all of our classes we had a nice Christmas dinner, just Edwina, Alistair, Abigael & myself.  We had a delicious dinner of veggies, pork wraps, and English style fries.   We had decided to do a gift exchange with a 20RMB limit which was fun.  It was so nice to have a little gift opening.  I made us all stocking with a chocolate in them! Edwina had made a banoffee (bannan-toffe) pie, which was good.  I didn’t know you could make toffee from condensed milk so that was fun to help her with.  Since china doesn’t have very many dairy products she couldn’t find whip cream for the pie but instead used this yogurt cheese things, but it still turned out nice.  Our holiday festivities concluded with 3 movies: Elf, Bad Santa & Home Alone.  A great night!!
聖誕快樂 (Merry Christmas)

**link to my pics posted to the right