Last year at this time we struggled to say the word “Christmas” in Chinese… this year, we got to tell friends what it is, and why we celebrate it! We tried to document all the different happenings:
No Christmas is complete w/o a school musical!
Kristen and I were invited to tell the Christmas story to a group of Chinese kids. We had a great time singing Christmas carols, telling them Who Christmas is about, and also talking about Santa and his reindeer!
Each year our university holds a Christmas/New Years party for all of the foreign students. This year, they asked Kristen and me to play Santa and Mrs. Claus!!! Our bag of presents to hand out was full of bars of soap, fingernail brushes, and other hygiene products 🙂 One person was offended.
Here is Kristen, I mean Mrs. Claus. We do not have a picture of Santa… he remains as elusive as ever!!!
We invited Chinese friends over to our house to make Christmas cookies…
This was the best looking Christmas cookie…a minion! Of course Kristen made it 🙂
A friend of ours has a family tradition to make an epic gingerbread scene each year. She invited us to participate… this year’s theme: Modern Nativity.
Kristen dressed in her gingerbread making outfit. Yikes.
Close up of the finished product. The girls built the thing and I did all of the white icing decoration! In the modern nativity shepherds are snowmen, camels are reindeer, and wisemen are ninjas. Also, there were butterflies on the roof.
Christmas morning we woke up early and hiked a nearby mountain with friends to watch the sunrise (our new yearly tradition that we started last year). We spent some time in praise for the True Light of the World!
It was cold (around 5 degrees F) so we built a little fire. We used my school test scores as kindle…
Sun is almost here!
We were cold, but it was well worth it!!!
Hiking back down the mountain to go have breakfast and open gifts!
In all, we feel super blessed this year and are looking forward to seeing what 2016 holds!
nomadic texan 