Christmas in the Classroom
It’s been an incredibly busy Christmas
week but it’s also been a fantastic experience.
The week really got going last Friday with the class Christmas party
here in Langfang. One of the privileges
I have here in China is the ability to share about western cultural and
personal family traditions. This means
that I get to share each American holiday with my students. Sharing about Thanksgiving was fun but
sharing about Christmas was the best!
The Christmas celebration for classes 1
and 3 started out with decorating the classroom. I brought an assortment of glittering
garlands and various knickknacks to spruce up the place. The students quickly got to work with my bag
of goodies and they put together some impressive displays. They actually took some green garland and
made an outline of a Christmas tree on the wall.
Once decorating was complete we moved
into the meat of the Christmas celebration.
I lectured briefly about the history of Santa Claus and ended my talk
with a reading of, “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” The students had a hard time following some
of the words but I had a PowerPoint presentation with pictures to help
illustrate. Then we moved on into
Christmas carols. The students even
shared with me the Chinese versions of such classics as Jingle Bells, which in
Chinese is called “Ding! Ding! Dong!”
Then it was time for presents. I
had previously asked the students to all bring a small gift to the class and
everyone was ready. We used the gifts
for a white elephant gift exchange.
The day before I had gone to the super
market and picked up a load of candy and cookies. I knew that it just wouldn’t be a good
Christmas party without treats. So I
pulled out my Santa bad and gave everyone cream covered rice cakes and tiny
jelly cups. The students just loved ‘em
and they all cheered. Finally it was
time for the greatest surprise of all!
A dear friend back in the states had collected and mailed to me a
bunch of one dollar bills. The American
currency came with implicit instructions that it was to be used as Christmas
present for the students. There were
enough bills to go around but I decided to make a little game out of the
distribution of this gift. I only pulled
out five of the bills and claimed that five was all that I had. We then proceeded to raffle off the five
bills to randomly selected students. The
students were super excited and it was clear that they all wanted their own
dollar bill from America. They were
literally on the edge of their seats during the raffle. Each time a name was selected from my Santa
hat the tension would grow. The students
were of course happy for the other students who won but there was clearly
disappointment when their own name wasn’t called.
The best part of the whole raffle came
at the end. I reached into my hat to
pull out a self-planted ticket that read, “Everyone.” At first the students were confused and I
played it off as some kind of mistake.
However, it was no mistake. In my
mock confusion I checked under the desk for any possible gifts that Santa might
have left behind. Sure enough, there was
the stack of bills for the other students.
When I pulled out the stack the room went crazy. The students were so happy. I distributed one dollar bill to each student
and they couldn’t be happier. Many of
the students told me that they would, “cherish the gift forever.” It’s a small gift but it really did mean a
lot. After my little charade was over I
confessed the whole thing and told the story of how the bills had been
collected by my friends back home. The
students all send their thanks.
Christmas
in Boading
This week has been simply littered with
Christmas parties. On Saturday and
Sunday, my team made their way to Boading for the IECS teacher Christmas
get-together. We were so graciously
hosted by team HFU for the weekend. I
feel like most of the weekend was spent eating, although I’m not complaining. We ate some really good food! We started out Saturday luncheon with donkey
burgers. Yes, I said “donkey.” Boading is famous for their fried bread
sandwiches with pulled donkey meat. It’s
actually really good and tastes similar to deer meat. Saturday evening was Christmas dinner where
everyone pitched in to make an assortment of American Christmas dishes. We had roast chicken, green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, and all kinds of other good foods. The evening ended with a fun white elephant
gift exchange where there was no shortage of gag gifts.
Sunday morning was the time for the
real gift exchange. We did a secret
Santa gift exchange with each of the more serious presents. I ended up getting a beautiful handmade Chinese scroll
and a t-shirt with panda bears doing Tai Chi.
I love ‘em. The day ended off
with us going to a really nice Italian restaurant in Boading for Pizza, pasta
and salad. Then we played games into the
late hours. It was a lot of fun.
Christmas with the College
As I retrospectively write this blog I
am reminded of just how many Christmas parties I’ve been too in the last
week! We came back from Boading on
Monday and Monday night we went to the Langfang Teacher College’s Christmas
celebration. It was a major production
in the main meeting hall with nearly a thousand or so students and facility in
attendance. It was mainly a talent show
whereby students showed off an assortment of dancing, singing, and other skills. Even us Americans got to get in on the act
when we got up and sung the “Twelve Days of Christmas” with funny actions for
everyone to follow. It’s a little odd to think of a Christmas production as
having a mixture of Chinese marital arts demonstrations, traditional Chinese
music, solo modern songs, and even synchronized dancing to Korean pop
music! I don’t normally associate Girls
Generation with traditional Christmas music… but oh, well!
Christmas in the Hospital
On Christmas Eve, after the school
celebration, I got a call from my good friend DC that my shifu (the old man who
teaches me taiji) was in the hospital. He had gone into the hospital over
the weekend due to internal stomach bleeding. At the time of the call the
doctors still did not know why this was happening but they were in the process
of running tests.
That night the doctors performed a
small operation and placed a camera tube down his throat to find the
problem. The good news is that the shifu simply had an open ulcer and
nothing more serious like cancer.
The doctors will keep the shifu in the
hospital for a few days to make sure that the bleeding stops but they say he
should heal quickly and be back to good health in a matter of weeks. They
have put him on a strict diet of soup and water while he heals, which my shifu
was not too happy about. But he is being a good patient.
On Christmas morning I went to visit
the shifu in the hospital. The shifu does not speak English but his
daughter was there and she is a very good translator. The shifu did not
want DC to tell me about the trip to the hospital as he did not want me to be
worrying about him over Christmas. He knew that this was a special time
for me as an American. I told the shifu that I am glad DC told me and I
told him about how my friends back in America were all hoping for his good
health. The shifu's daughter was greatly moved by this act and it took
her a moment before she could translate my words into Chinese. Upon hearing
this in Chinese my shifu smiled, started crying, and then he even bowed to me
in gratitude.
It was merely a moment on the side of a
hospital bed on Christmas morning in China... but it was a powerful
moment. I got to share a little joy with an old Chinese man and his
daughter on Christmas.
