Christmas

So Christmas came and went this year, probably just as fast as it would have back at home, but the culture of Christmas is not at all the same here. So far, the kindergarten where we work has done a decent job at remembering the important American holidays like Halloween and Thanksgiving. When we got to the middle of December and there was no sign of Christmas yet, we were beginning to worry.

We didn't worry for too long though, because a week before Christmas day, the decorations finally came out. We were informed of 3 separate Christmas parties in the kindergarten, and 1 for the primary school, in which we performed musical numbers. They asked us to come to the practice a few days before the first party and we had a great time watching the kids perform their dances. But we were still yet to hear a song that had anything to do with Christmas (unless Gangnam Style has taken over Christmas). Alicia and I performed a duet with my ukulele singing "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer". It didn't really fit into the rest of the music styles, but we wanted to hold up our end of a western-culture Christmas.

Now before I launch into the details of the Christmas parties, I want to mention that my selfless wife Alicia wanted to make sure we had some good Christmas spirit this year so she carried out a well-planned "12 Days of Christmas" with a different gift for me every day leading up to Christmas. I loved every single gift. I don't know how she got all the gifts so sneakily because we are always together. Here they are in a carefully remembered list:

12 - A bag of twelve snickers candy bars (they are pretty expensive here, but a fabulous treat)
11 - Eleven sticky notes hidden around the apartment with love notes written on them
10 - One pedicure for ten toes
9 - Blogpost titled "9 Things I love about Tom"
8 - Eight Homemade chocolate turtles
7 - Seven days of not having to wash the dishes
6 - Six Love Poems
5 - A 5 meter measuring tape
4 - Four 10-Yuan bills for buying any treats I want at the store
3 - Three Love emails from Alicia's secret email address
2 - Two new knives, one for my keychain, and one for my utility drawer
1 - A bag of Alpenliebe candy, like cream savers

So many gifts. Thanks Alicia for bringing the Christmas spirit home. In addition to the giftage, we decided that since we couldn't find any cheap trees at the store, we would make a tree out of paper and tape it on the wall. We even found a short strand of lights to put on it. Here's a pic.

Now the kindergarten parties were a force of cuteness to be reckoned with. We've got way too many videos of cute children that don't belong to us and we can only post a fraction of what we have here, so I'll try to keep it brief. Keep in mind that we attended 3 of these parties and they were all basically the same, so it will be hard to differentiate all the different videos with "Gangnam Style" playing in the background.

This is a small clip of the Happy Babies doing a fashion show with homemade designer clothing.

This is one of Alicia's favorite Small Babies. He's got the perfect hair for rockin' out and this is a little sneak peak of what we get everytime we sing a fun song with him.

This is the Happy Babies doing Gangnam Style.

They have a guy who teaches the little babies Kung Fu. Our city (Cangzhou) is one of the original cities and founders of Kung Fu (supposedly).

This is the Smile Babies doing a cute little dance.

This is the Super Babies reciting a poem that was written by Mao Zedong about winter. I just think it's interesting that he is such an honored leader here.

This is Linda, one of my smartest Super Babies, putting decorations on the Christmas trees outside the school.

This is Xi Xi (English name: Ace) and his mom. They are having fun helping decorate the trees.

Okay this picture is important. This kid is named Erba, but who else can see the resemblance to Tim Madsen as a little kid? Please let me know what you think.

Alicia is helping Erba with the decorations.

This is a group picture of all the kindy teachers, students, parents, and more!

The primary school had over three hours of performances up their sleeve as well. We got front row seats in the lunchroom as honorary guests to watch performance after performance of non-Christmas themed dances and music. It was still very neat though. We got to sing TWO songs at this party, so we included "Santa Claus is Coming To Town". I'll try to keep it brief with the pictures and videos below.

This was a good little intro to show the one Christmas song they all knew how to sing.

This may be one of our favorite performances of the event. The sixth grade boys put on a great shuffle.

This is another dance by the 6th grade students. We mostly put this clip in to show the awesome special effects. Watch carefully.

This is the 1st grade putting on some sort of skit. Not sure what the story is about, but it was entertaining. The kid who runs in wearing black is named Spencer. He loves us, but the only English words he's ever spoken are "Hello Teacher", and "I like ALL THE COLORS!!". Whenever he sees us, he runs up, points to himself, and says "S-pentherrrrr" with a very strong lisp.

Here you get to see a special clip of our Christmas performance. Before watching this video, make sure the volume is up. The teacher we asked to take the video handed the camera off to another teacher, and they speak some sort of alien language (it's just Chinese) to each other. So crazy sounding.

After the performance, the lunch lady, who speaks no English, wanted to make us a special dinner of tomato and egg and some other dish. We gratefully accepted. As we were walking out of the lunchroom doors, Kyle called and said he would be there to pick us up in 20 minutes to take us to a Christmas party with some college students at his hospital. He made sure that we brought the ukulele to sing songs for everyone. I guess Christmas is all about performances here.

We walked into a classroom full of college age students studying at the hospital and to our surprise, we were instant celebrities. We were sat down on the front row with a pile of oddly-flavored sunflower seeds and peanuts heaped on the desks. We were given oranges and apples like crazy, and they were constantly asking us if we wanted to participate, although the entire program was being given in Chinese. Although the communication barrier was still there, we felt much more comfortable with a crowd of people that were close to our age.

We played a game where we had to draw a backpack with a blindfold on.

Then we had to guess which picture was our own. If you got it right, you got a new pen and some glowstick candy. Saweet.

The party was a lot of fun and they all loved our Christmas song performance. When we stood up to leave, Kyle took the microphone and explained in Chinese that we believe in God. Everyone made a oohhh sound and we went on our way. It was very interesting that out of anything, he chose to tell them that. As we were walking out of the classroom, a girl came running in excitement to tell us that she was from Tianjin, and that she also believed in God. We had a short bonding moment, and went our separate ways.

If this Christmas Eve doesn't sound long enough yet, then let's tack on another couple hours of hanging out with Kyle and Lily at KFC. To tell the truth, those couple hours were probably the most interesting we had out of the whole season. Apparently word got out that a couple of foreigners were eating dinner at KFC on Christmas Eve because all of the sudden, there were two photographers taking pictures of us. Keep in mind, I was wearing a yellow bow tie, a santa hat, and was carrying around a peculiar instrument called a ukulele, and eating ice cream. There was one photographer taking pictures from 30 feet away using a huge telescopic lens. In my usual practice, I awkwardly waved at her until she aknowledged me. She waved back, but didn't miss a beat and kept taking pictures. Soon, the guy on the very next table, about as close as he could possibly be to me, whipped out this huge camera and was taking pictures of me paleting my ice cream, bite by bite. In addition to the paparazzi, I was told by two different people at that KFC that I look like the President of Russia, and also a frenchmen. I blame it on the bowtie. But the most mindblowing thing that happened that evening at KFC was when Kyle leaned accross the table and asked us an alarming question: "So do you know the meaning of Christmas?" I guess it shouldn't suprise me coming from a man who lives in a country full of atheists, but we had to explain to him who Christ was and what the Bible was, and how Christmas is spelled with His name in it. Mind blowing. We kept it all very brief, of course, to avoid proselyting.

Before we knew it, it was 10:30 and we were ready to go home. Unfortunately, we still had to work on Christmas, and go to our last kindy Christmas party. On Christmas, we left straight from the party to go to dinner with Kyle and friends. They wanted to take us somewhere special for Christmas dinner so we went to this sichuan style food place. There was an above average amount of delicous Chinese food there, and we were very happy to have it. I included a bunch of the pictures from that dinner in our Kyle and friends post a few days ago, but there are a couple of dishes that should be noted. The spicy duck head was unbelievable spicy. You should avoid that at all costs. And the fish bathed in oil should also be mentioned. So delicious. And finally, there were ribs of some sort that had been cooked with apricots and brown sugar and they were soooo good. Before we left the restaurant, Kyle strongly encouraged us to sing a song on the stage at the restaurant. Luckily, we had a couple of recently practiced Christmas songs under our belt so we did it. I know that no one in the restuarant understood the words to Rudolph, so I pretended it was a love song and gave Alicia a kiss at the end. It was a Christmas to remember.