Christmas in China

Lately my internet has been working less and less in my room of my apartment. So that means that my blog posts are becoming more and more infrequent because the room where my wifi is located is cold right now since it’s winter. So I meant to post this a few days ago, but I got a little lazy.

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about how/if the Chinese celebrate Christmas. In reality they don’t. In fact, my kindergarten even still had school on Christmas day! But the foreigners in Changsha do still celebrate Christmas (kind of), and as always, business are willing to make a profit off of that! 😉
To the Chinese, Christmas is a western holiday that has no meaning to them, but they know what it is and when it is. You’ll see certain cafés and bars and restaurants that are aimed towards westerners will put up Christmas decorations. Some businesses might put up a tree or have some lights out front. But that’s it. Christmas is the western Chinese New Year (or Spring Festival)

At school, it’s the foreign teacher’s job to create and put up all the Christmas decorations. So we’ve been spending the last month working on decorations around the kindergarten, and inside our classroom, as well as working on crafts and cooking activities with our kids and teaching them all the Christmas vocabulary. My favorite days are Wednesdays because those are the days that we get to show them a Christmas movie.

On Christmas Eve, the foreign teachers put together a morning circle time where we played games and sang songs together. Then we split up into our classroom where we did different things. My class made cookies and we had a Christmas dinner together with the children, their parents, and the classroom teachers. 🙂 This is my first long weekend since I got here. It is much needed. Zzzzzz.

Merry Christmas to you all 🙂