Christmas Chaos

Christmas was unlike any Christmas I have ever had.  Of course, it was in Thailand. The Thai teachers wanted the foreign teachers to put on a show for the students, on Christmas Day.  We had meetings every Thursday after school for hours trying to come up with ideas that everyone liked and agreed with.  It was not coming together and Christmas was coming up! Finally, the week before, we came up with a Christmas carnival idea with six stations and two foreign teachers at each station.  That way, everyone could do what they wanted at the station and everyone would be happy.  The Thai teachers were not that excited, they really wanted to see us sing and dance and make Christmas fools of 

ourselves.  

6/1's Christmas Tree!

Some fun art projects we did!

On Christmas we were all feeling a little nostalgic and sad that we weren’t with our families.  We were all also a little nervous that this day was going to be crazy! We sang “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” at assembly and then broke off into our stations.  We had pratom 1, 2, and 3 coming in the morning and then 4, 5, and 6 in the afternoon so it was going to be a busy day! There are about 35 students in every class and we would be getting up to 4 classes at a time, every 20 minutes! Goodness. Leah and I were doing “Pin the Nose on the Snowman.” We made two huge snowmen and cut out some noses for the kids to try to tape on.  We put a Santa hat over their eyes and then spun them three times. The little kids were so cute! There were so many kids each time that not everyone got to go :-/  The students each had to bring a present for a gift exchange they do each year that was up to 50 baht and we each brought one that was 100 baht so a few lucky students got a special surprise. 

 One of the stations was Santa handing out the presents to the students, another was a Christmas Tree drawing contest, a dance competition station, and then some other games.  Leah teaches pratom 5 and I teach pratom 6, so we quickly knew that pin the nose on the snowman was not going to fly with the older kids. We tried to think of some new fun ideas for them and Leah really wanted to do a Christmas rap! Our first group was 6/1, 6/2, 6/3 and 6/7.  I beatboxed while she rapped a Christmas song, it was so funny and so embarrassing. Afterwards, we told them to get in groups and come up with their own rap. It did not go over well. Haha they were all too shy to do it or didn’t understand what we wanted...great. Then we decided to play charades with the next group.  One student would come up and pick “Santa Claus” or “snowman” and have to act it out.  It went ok but was too hard for such a large group.  The next group we broke them up into 2 large groups and had them play “Duck, Duck, Goose!” It was so much better and they loved the huge circles they would have to run around.  We did that the rest of the time and were all super exhausted when the day was finally over! 

Pin the Nose on the Snowman!

So cute!

Christmas Rapping!

However, the day wasn’t completely over.  The director wanted to take us to dinner for Christmas, super nice but they always think we want to eat American food, so they take us to this disgusting “Steak House” that has no form of steak whatsoever! We would rather have great Thai food than bad American food... There is a weird hot dog thing, fish and pork. The french fries and beer are good though! We had a lot of fun all together at this unconventional Christmas dinner and made the best of being away from our families.  

I was able to skype with my family during their Christmas Day. But it kind of just made it harder to see them all together and doing our traditional Christmas things, while I  taught Buddhist Thai children about this Christian holiday. 

It made it a little easier that we were leaving the next day for Krabi for a week vacation! We all had been so excited and preparing for weeks. We took the night bus to Bangkok, got their around 4 and then headed straight to the airport for our flight down to Krabi! 

To be continued....