Just before us foreign teachers went on Christmas break, we had our fun cultural lesson about Christmas. Christmas seems to be a relatively new holiday in China, and since it’s not culturally relevant here (not celebrated in any religious sense, of course), it is instead a day for people to go shopping and sing KTV (or so I’m told). These kids are young enough that they may have heard of Christmas, but they really don’t know what it is. I remedied this by showing a scaled-down version of my Christmas PPT that I had used earlier in my summer camps (complete with colorful images of everything enjoyable and relevant to kids). At the end, after I had explained who Santa Claus was and why kids loved him, some of the kids wondered why Santa didn’t visit them. I had to inform my co-teacher that it’s because the Chinese don’t celebrate Christmas (there really isn’t a gentle way to break it to them as to why Santa skips this area of the world when he delivers presents).

But as a way to bring the Christmas experience a bit closer to home for them, we had a Secret Santa gift exchange activity where each kid brought in a gift and drew a name to see who they would give it to. This took longer than expected. A few of the kids had not brought anything in, so the Chinese teachers had to scramble to find something in the classroom that could be used as a gift. From there, we moved on to passing out my homemade hot chocolate (and by homemade, I mean I bought a bunch of Swiss Miss packets, added some chocolate milk and cinnamon, and brought it into my rice cooker). The rest of the class consisted of having the kids watch “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” while some of them drew Christmas cards. It’s always amusing to see how young kids see and draw images of you.