The Holiday Blur

The Christmas Blur

Essentially our Christmas celebration has gone on for three weeks. Saying that to myself, it sounds like a long time, until you think about the fact that back home, we’d be celebrating just as long, though with less effort. The Thanksgiving decorations come out right on the heels of Halloween, and starting the day after Thanksgiving, Christmas is fair game. Start shopping, put up the lights, and crank out all our favorite songs from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. As a random little factoid, I ran an internet search on a lot of Christmas favorites. I think in the list of the top 12 that I DJed at school last week, the most recent song was from 1959 (“Jingle Bell Rock” if memory serves).

I was in the holiday spirit and wrote and mailed off about 30 cards this Christmas. It’s the first time I’ve ever mailed off Christmas cards. The cards in Taiwan are adorable, and very Taiwanese—glitter, bows, sequins, fuzzy stickers, and pop-ups. I’ve been told by a number of people who’ve gotten their cards that my cards this year were absolutely adorable. Hopefully they weren’t just trying to stroke my ego. I did try match appropriate cards with the right people. I also tend to avoid “Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! Love, Erin.” If my messages weren’t entirely Christmas oriented, it’s because when I write, I try to say what I mean. Particularly if we haven’t talked in a while, I may have more to say than “Merry Christmas.” But I digress.

The celebration started December 10th with a get-together in Luodong, eating great food, watching classic Christmas cartoons (you know the ones, Rank-Bass, stop motion animation…), listening to Christmas music, and playing games (like guessing which Christmas character is on your back). It was a fantastic night.

Monday it was back to the grindstone again, aware that it was going to be the last week of school for most of my friends who are Stateside, and that when Christmas came, for me, it’d be just another weekend. Our winter break doesn’t start until January 23rd, after our mid-year conference in Hualien. Monday, I did teach the story of Frosty the Snowman to my second graders. (At this point I lost track of writing the blog…all of this was actually written in December…from this point forward, I’m writing on January19, and hopefully this post will go up tonight.)

Saturday the 17th, we gathered together for family at Xue Shan K—cheeseburgers, French fries, sweet potato fries, and falafel. It was amazing. And I continued to write Christmas cards and mail off Christmas packages throughout the week.

Christmas week came. I made Christmas themed worksheets for 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade. On one side of the worksheet were the lyrics to “Jingle Bell Rock.” On the reverse side, the third graders had picture and word matching to do (useful words from the song like “horse” and “clock”). I gave fourth and fifth grade the words “Merry Christmas” with the task of making as many words as possible from the letters. For the fifth grade, we did the assignment on the board together; the students raised their hands as they came up with words. They were really excited; I don’t think they had realized that they knew some of those words—it was bringing up vocabulary they had learned but that they hadn’t used in a while and had forgotten about. For the fourth graders, we made 3 copies of MERRY CHRISTMAS and cut the letters out separately, distributing them to each of the three groups. I figured seeing the letters and moving them around themselves would help them find the words. It really did—we didn’t end up with just words like “cat” and “hat”—we got “earth” and “match” to name a couple. They were excited and didn’t seem to want to stop the activity when class was over.

This week our Wednesday workshop was at Yilan Senior High School. We had been assigned to groups of ten to twelve students to hold a discussion with. After our discussion period (my group’s topic was School Life), the students taught us how to make the special dumpling soup eaten on the winter solstice (which happened to be that day), and how to play Chinese chess. Talking to the high school students was really great, and it was interesting to learn about the difference between high school in Taiwan and high school in the US. For example, in Taiwan, high school students are in school from 8-5, and many students have dinner and then go to cram school, sometimes from 6 or 7 to 9. I explained that usually in American high schools, school only went from 8-3, but that frequently students have after school jobs, and are members of sports teams and extra activities. I can remember staying after school until 10 or 11 for theatre in high school, and later on the weekends when opening night was getting close. Extracurricular activities and jobs in high school are significantly less common here.

Friday morning (Christmas Eve Day) we sang Jingle Bell Rock at the morning assembly, and I spoke to the students about Christmas celebrations at home. I mentioned some of our traditions regarding decorating the tree as a family, putting up lights, and spending time together. I also pointed out, that even though it’s a time of year when we usually get presents, a lot of people also take that time to remember to be grateful for what they have, and to help other people. As one example, I told them about my high school’s Adopt-a-Family program, and how each homeroom becomes responsible for one family during the holidays. When I was done with my presentation, we asked the students questions about what I said, and handed out candy in exchange for the right answers. At lunch that day, I DJed the lunch time music with our Director of Student Affairs.

Christmas morning dawned and I opened my stocking and presents from home—which I had been waiting on for Christmas Day. I cooked a big breakfast for us in the apartment—bacon, eggs, and pancakes. It wasn’t quite as good as when my mom usually makes it, but I did my best, it got good reviews, so that’s what counts, right? Right. We spent Christmas Day in Nanao, celebrating Stu and Jenny’s birthdays (which were later on that week). Stu’s school—Wu Ta—hosted the barbeque and we had a great day together until it was time to take the train home. Everyone was so friendly, and we even got to shoot at a target (a picture of a pig) with bows and arrows.

New Year’s Eve was the following Friday and I chose to celebrate in Yilan. After dinner with a few friends, followed by Yahtzee and coloring pictures from a Christmas coloring book (thank you, Sarah), we went out to join the celebration in front of Luna Plaza. There was a throng of people outside, gathered around the stage where performers were singing and dancing. The midnight countdown counted from a hundred, and at midnight, there was a fireworks display behind us. I was able to ring in the New Year with friend’s and was back in my own room before 12:30. Often dates in Taiwan are written in the western date form (20XX), but sometimes they’re written with the year according to Taiwan’s founding. Right now, we are in year 100.

The past couple of weeks have gone pretty smoothly finishing up the semester. We had our last workshop for the semester at Zhongshan Elementary School, where we learned about screen printing with my 4E class, and calligraphy up in the library with a retired professor. It was a lot of fun, and I could see how excited my students were to get to show us how to do the screen printing. I finished my last day of school for the semester today, and tomorrow morning we leave for the mid-year conference in Hualien. Hopefully I’ll be more prompt about updating my blog in the future. My goal was 1-2 times a month…and I didn’t manage at all in December. Well, better luck at it in the New Year. Chinese New Year is bearing down on us (as evidenced in nearly any store you walk into), and my mom will be visiting soon. I can’t wait to show her what a fantastic place Taiwan is.

(Okay, so I finished writing this blog post yesterday while waiting to do my language exchange and forgot to upload it when I got home last night. Later this week I'll blog about Taroko Gorge where I arrived today.)