Christmas in China

For those of you who are curious about our first Christmas away from home, it was AWESOME. Though Chinese people don't celebrate Christmas, they love to hear about it, and most major stores have a Christmas tree up somewhere, and sometimes a lot more :)

Christmas Carols are playing in every store you go to, both in English and Chinese. We started to learn a few Christmas Carols in Chinese at our school, which we could sing if we had the words in front of us! Maybe next year we'll be able to do it without looking.

We have managed to enjoy a lot of the festivities this year, such as singing Christmas Carols (even with other Chinese people... they love it!), making gingerbread houses (I was able to do this with some Chinese Children with some friends of ours), and we even got to go ice-skating!

Oh, and for those of you who have been wondering about Drew's skateboarding escapades, here's a quick preview of his latest endeavor. This is in front of a school of 500 students who had never heard about Christmas and all it means before.

On Christmas Day, we received text messages most of the day from all of our Chinese friends wishing us a Merry Christmas, which we thought was super cool that they remembered, and thought of us on our favorite holiday.

We celebrated in the morning just the two of us, opening presents and reading the Christmas story and eating a giant breakfast of dutch pancakes (crapes), bacon, and eggs. In the afternoon we went to a Christmas party with some of our friends and ate all of the fixings! Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, and the list goes on! That night we went home and got on skype video and watched my family open presents. The next morning we talked with Drew's parents, which was Christmas night for them.

My favorite part of Christmas day was going to a couple of our Chinese friends' places and giving them Christmas cookies. They were so excited to try Western Christmas Cookies! For both places, it was their first time. They were so grateful for something so small!

Even though it was hard to be away from everyone, I feel like this was one of my favorite Christmases. It has been amazing to share what this season means to us to so many people, and be embraced by those around us. We absolutely love China and the Chinese people! How special to celebrate our first Christmas just the two of us in the place we know we were made to be in. We couldn't imagine being anywhere else. To all of our friends near and far, Sheng Dan Kuai Le! (Merry Christmas)