Since it's your holiday, would you like to perform for us?

Would you like us to perform at your Christmas party? Just call us!

Mathews Family Christmas 2010

A common sight at Christmas time this year. Me and Kirk.

Lily and I at Mr. Mai's Christmas party

The cold weather has finally arrived in Wuhan. For those of you who followed my blog last year, you remember how much I despise the cold weather. Being from the Midwest, I'm used to it. However, in China, if it's cold outside it's also cold inside since the heating isn't that great here. I'm not complaining too much though since it's been warm much longer than it was last year!

As you can guess, Christmas was the theme of the past few weeks around here. Kirk, Daniel, and I (the senior 2 teachers) decided to have our classes act out the Christmas story. It went pretty good. The students enjoyed laughing at their classmates who were acting as angels, wise men, a pregnant woman, etc. Every class, I would start out with the question "Why do C's celebrate Christmas?" This usually led to a student saying it was the birth of JC. I liked to have fun with it and say I had a birthday too, why wasn't Christmas at that time? Most of them remembered from last year's Christmas lesson that he was the Son. However, the funniest answer came from a girl who said, "Because JC was a great man and you are not." I thought this lesson went really well, and I hope the students took a lot away from it.

As foreign teachers, we're used to being asked to do some small performances every once in a while. But the week before Christmas this year was out of control! Mr. Mai's (an English coffee shop) and our school's English Club had asked us a few weeks in advance to help lead/perform at their Christmas parties. We were happy to do this and were expecting to do these anyways as well as a party we were throwing for Chinese English teachers. Three parties. Three performances. Three days. Busy, but we were expecting that.

What we weren't expecting was that the school administration was going to tell us to perform at two other parties. Not ask. Tell us. They didn't even ask our input on when these parties would be. I was pretty ticked off at our school. On top of forcing us to perform, one of the parties conflicted with the Mr. Mai's party! Now, we were at five parties/performances in 3 days. And on Christmas Eve, it was 3 parties at 3 different locations within about 5 hours! It's not that we didn't want to help out at these parties. Our group just felt used by the school, especially during a time when we were supposed to be able to relax! Here's a brief timeline of our few days leading up to Christmas.

Wed, Dec 29, 6:00-8:30pm - We threw a party for Chinese English teachers. Not as many came as we were hoping, but we had a great time eating snacks, playing games, exchanging white elephant gifts, and Daniel told them what Christmas means to us.

Thu, Dec 30, 6:00-8:00pm - We attended a party for one section of our school's students. It was mostly students performing. We sang "Feliz Navidad." Then we called up a bunch of teachers and had them dance with us to "12 Days of Christmas." The students loved it. I don't have the video, but you can go to Rebecca's blog (rebecca-diane.blogspot.com) and scroll down to her Dec 23 post if you'd like to see it.

Fri, Dec 31, 5:00-6:00pm - We attended the English Club's Christmas party and ended the party with a few songs, "Joy to the World," "Jingle Bell Rock," and the world-premiere of "Santa's Pants." What's that, you haven't heard of "Santa's Pants!!??" It's the parody I wrote of Bad Romance by Lady Gaga! She is hugely popular over here, so I thought it would be funny to write a parody of one of her songs. Basically, the song is about Cory (one of our teachers) who stole Santa's suit and did his job one night. However, he ate so many milk and cookies that he got fat and couldn't get out of Santa's pants. It wasn't as big a hit as "Nobody," but the students really liked it. If I can get a video of it, I'll try to post it on here some time.

6:00-7:30pm - Some student's parents picked us up from the school to take us to a nearby restaurant where one of my classes was having a Christmas performance for their families. We visited with the students for a few minutes then started the show off with a few songs. "Feliz Navidad" and "Jingle Bell Rock" if I remember correctly. Then we immediately rushed off to our last party for the night. I felt bad not sticking around longer to watch my students, but this was the party that we were forced to go to without any say on when the party was.

7:30-pm - 1:00am - We were finally not the focus of a party (at least for a little while) at Mr. Mai's. Some other foreigners were performing for awhile. Around 8:30, our group led some crafts (Christmas decorations led by Rebecca and Mandi) and a game (Christmas Bingo led by me, Kirk, Cory, and Daniel). Around 10:30, Kirk and I sang a few songs before we did "Santa's Pants" again. The second time went even better. We ended the night with a game kind of like the Singing Bee from TV. Mandi called up Chinese people and had them try to finish the lines of famous Christmas carols. The party ended at midnight, but we stayed and helped clean up before finally returning home at 1am. We could finally just relax and celebrate Christmas! I'm really proud of everyone, as it was a lot of work that week.

Christmas was pretty non-eventful, which was exactly what we wanted. We slept in and had a group devotional time before heading to Papa John's for our second annual pizza lunch. Then, we went back home, hung out, and watched Christmas movies, including the group favorite, Elf!

Late that night, I skyped in for my family Christmas. My parents had sent some gifts with me when I came in the summer and also mailed me a package with more. It was pretty much our regular family Christmas...except that I was in the other side of the world. We even took a family picture with me on the computer screen!

Dec 31 was Rebecca's birthday, so we had a pizza party before heading to our friends' home to play games and celebrate the New Year. I really wish I could write more since so much has happened the last few weeks, but we have been unbelievably busy lately! We have about two more weeks before China's Spring Festival which means about a month off. I have been exhausted the past few weeks, and I am so ready for this break. More on that next time. I hope your 2011 is great. Make it happen!