It's Christmas. I am admittedly a bit homesick as it is my first Christmas that I have ever spent away from my family and not on Saltpspring. The good news is that we did manage to get the day off from work and we are celebrating in fine Weifang style. I've spent the last 2 hours or so waiting for these photos to load so I am going to let them do a lot of the explaining. I am sorry that the text is not in the right spots to explain the following photos properly. Apparently today's internet connection is not supporting formatting.
It snowed! It's a White Christmas! To be fair, it snowed on Friday. Now it's Monday, and there's still snow. Also, we had a great snow day at school. These are the photos of my street at 5:30 am all covered in snow and peaceful. It was pretty magical.
The next ones are the kids all excited to be outside making snow angels, snowmen, and having snowball fights. All in good cold fun.
No Christmas would be complete without making mice in a nutshell. My mom used to come into our classes in elementary school to make these with our classes. I've spent the last few months on a serious supply hunt to ensure that I could make them with my class. Oh, and I have eaten a lot of walnuts too.
The next ones are my homeroom class gift exchange. You can see how adorable the kids are. They ordered matching reindeer antlers to wear all day. When I walked into the room in the morning, they gave me a pair to wear too. It's this kind of adorable thoughtfulness that makes me love these kids a lot even though I have never really been one to get into the Christmas spirit. Oh, and all of us teachers wore our ugly sweaters/scarves purchased from the streets of Weifang. I had to pair that reindeer scarf with everything that matched. Yes, this means pink pants in the winter.
For Christmas, we had games and activities all day instead of classes. We started out with that gift exchange game where you steal presents from each other. I was the lucky recipient of a large teddy bear. The lucky student that got my present is now the owner of a one of a kind Ms. Temmel as Mau enamel cup. The grand finale was each class performing a Christmas carol. My class performed an adapted version of the 12 Days of Christmas. I helped them switch up the words so it was "...my teachers gave to me..." and then left them to it. You can also see that they made up a poster to hold up for each one. Unfortunately, they sprung my role of the 5th day of Christmas on me at the last minute. This meant that I was front and centre and having to sing with them. Obviously, I was rather embarrassed. But I figure it's fair game because as their teacher, I make them do all sorts of stuff they don't want to do all the time.
Finally, we arrive on Christmas Day. Tragically and comically, we have all met at one of the many local shopping malls to set up camp at Starbucks all day to spike our drinks with Baileys and chat with our families on skype. It's very warm and Christmasy here. I think the lowest point was when we had Christmas lunch at KFC. I don't really have words to explain the series of events that have led me to eating at KFC on Christmas. The silver lining is that no one is cleaning up right now and I am spending my Christmas in good company.
I hope you are all well and enjoying the holiday season with loved ones! Drink a rum and egg nog for me!
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