An English Teacher in China: A Beijing Christmas

The Paschke Family Christmas Tree

Who would have ever guessed that I would one day be celebrating Christmas in Beijing? But that's exactly what I did this past weekend. The other IECS teachers and I were all invited to celebrate Christmas this weekend with two American families that live and work in Beijing. The Paschke and Cramer families are good friends of IECS and they treated us with some amazing hospitality. They opened up their homes to us, they bought us Christmas presents, and even help arrange a bus for us to travel through Beijing in style. But, I’m getting ahead of the story.

The Christmas weekend started out with traveling early Saturday morning. It had snowed the day before and now the roads had become incredibly icy. However, that doesn’t mean that the Langfang taxis slow down. No, they still traveled their maddening speeds as usual. We made good time getting to the train station and in no time we were off to Beijing. This was my first time taking the fast train and the journey only took 20 minutes. Of course we were traveling at a speed of 300 km/h.

We arrived at the Beijing train station and we were greeted by Laura Cramer in a Santa hat. She showed us to our bus and to our surprise the bus had been turned into a Christmas wonderland. Christmas music played over the loud speakers, Santa hats adorned every chair, and garland hung from the ceiling. This was a great start to the day. We made our way first to the Pearl Market to do some last minute Christmas shopping. The ladies at the Pearl Market all speak English but you can give them a real shock by speaking Chinese! It’s fun.

After a lighting fast shopping spree we were all back on the bus and off to West Beijing for lunch. We stopped by one of the historic districts in Beijing where a lot of western style restaurants were located. It was here that we ate real authentic pizza for lunch. Dan Paschke and his two boys took over as our hosts for the rest of the afternoon and we all took a rickshaw tour of the historic district. Originally the plan was to go skating but the weather was too warm and the icy lake wasn’t strong enough to hold anyone. We traveled all over the city and found ourselves ultimately in the Beijing modern art district. It was pretty cool to get to see all the interested sculptures and paintings of the newer Chinese artists.

That evening we ended up at the Paschke family’s house in the expatriate community known as the Beijing Rivera. The Beijing Rivera is a bunch of large western style houses located on stamp-sized yards. Most of the huge houses were literally within arm’s reach of the next house. However, the houses are quite spacious on the inside and the Paschke family had done a really good job with decorating.

The Paschke’s private cook had prepared a special Christmas dinner for us. However, the menu might be considered a bit unorthodox for Christmas. We ate homemade steak, chicken and hamburger fajitas. We ate homemade tortilla chips with salsa and guacamole. We had all kinds of fruits and deserts. Laura Cramer had made for us two pumpkin pies, a batch of brownies, ice cream, pound cake, coconut cream pie, and even Christmas cookies. It was all delicious!

After dinner we gathered in the family room for games. We played a game of White Elephant whereby I won a box of Cocoa Puff Cereal. It’s amazing how the little things from America can make a difference but I was super excited about eating cereal again. I haven’t eaten any breakfast cereal for four months!

We also played a game whereby we compared most embarrassing team Christmas photos… Team Tianjin won for obvious reasons…(See the photo below.)

The best part of the whole night came when Jess Shamble surprised us all with her Santa sack. She first acted like there was nothing more for us to do and it was time to turn in. However, it was then that she “found” an unnoticed sack lying in the other room. She turned the sack over and more than 500 Christmas cards from America spilled out on the floor. It was a huge surprise! I was getting quite teary-eyed when I saw the mess hit the floor.

Christmas in Beijing was amazing. The Paschke and Cramer families really were super with opening up their homes and hosting us. For the first time it really felt like Christmas. I especially miss my friends and family at this time of year but the letters from home really made me happy. It reminded me of all the love from the home-front and it encourages me to continue pressing on with my work here in China. Thanks everyone for the Christmas cards and may you and your families have a very Merry Christmas!