Christmas

Christmas has been a whirlwind here. We started with all things Christmas in November and have been doing nothing else since it seems like. Our school has a classroom decorating contest, but we have to use all recyclables. That was a challenge, but it ended up looking really good. We made candy-canes and wreaths out of toilet paper rolls, a Christmas tree out of handprints cut out of green plastic bags, snow from shredded paper, and boxes the kids brought in to wrap presents. We also made a TON of snowflakes, and decorated some of them with glitter.









We also had 2 staff parties, one of which we had to come up with a performance, that was also performed at the outdoor program. I think we did a pretty good job!








We also have 2 nights worth of a Christmas program, and each night has 2 parts, an indoor and an outdoor program. We spent many hours preparing our 4th grade performance... a kind of acting out of the 12 days of Christmas. The outdoor program consists of all the grades performing some kind of dance, skit, or song. The indoor program is put on by the music teacher and each grade had a song or several songs to sing. After all the hours of preparation, practices, and decorating, it all ended after a few hours on a Friday and Saturday night. It was fun though, and I've already got ideas for next year.

A Thai Thanksgiving

(Yes, Thanksgiving was last month, but as you can probably already tell, I'm late in most of my posts, so bear with me.)
It's funny that when you find yourself living overseas, you realize that a lot of the big holidays that we celebrate at home aren't celebrated in the rest of the world. It makes sense, but it's not something that you realize until you get here. Of course Thailand wouldn't celebrate Thanksgiving, there are no piligrims or indians here... my kids have never even heard of the Mayflower :P So Thanksgiving day here was just like any other day. We went to school and did all the things we do every day. I was lucky enough to find a live stream of the Macy's Day parade! That was awesome, but I had to stay up until midnight to finish it... eek. But we were able to have a huge Thanksgiving feast that Saturday. All of the staff got together and had a wonderful party. We had it at my apartment, so we cleared out all of our furniture and brought in tables. It's amazing how we fit soooo many people into such a small space! We tried to make it look as festive as possible, down to cutting out fall leaves out of construction paper. We had wassail (mmmm), turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, a philippino dish that was fantastic!, broccoli casserole, and sooo much more!
There aren't many pictures from the day, because we were so busy eating and enjoying ourselves, but here are the few that I do have: