聖誕節...

...a.k.a. shengdan jie a.k.a. Christmas a.k.a. a strange time to be abroad. Christmas didn't seem like Christmas this year, because there was no Christmas break to look forward to, and no snow, and not even any cold weather (Christmas Day? in the 70s), and no big rush of holiday preparations and baking cookies and visiting relatives. I was kind of glad that it didn't feel like Christmas, because it kept me from feeling too sad. If I were at home and I had to work all day on Christmas and didn't get to be with my family, I'd be pretty upset. Here, I don't mind, because it didn't really feel much different from any other Thursday anyway.

The days leading up to Christmas were really crazy and busy and kind of stressful for me, but I survived with the help of an emergency infusion of American baked goods that arrived by surprise. THANK YOU AUNT KARYN; YOU ARE AWESOME. THE CHOCOLATE-RASPBERRY CHIP ONES ARE MY FAVORITE.

I did try a bit to get into the Christmas spirit. The closest I came was on Christmas Eve. I was working in my room when I heard Christmas music. It was surprisingly loud, and it sounded decidedly unprofessional. At first I figured it was somebody playing a tape of children singing Christmas songs or something (not too uncommon in my recent life). Then I tried to figure out where the sound was coming from, and I realized that it was from outside my window. I opened the window to find the source of the sound, and looking down into our courtyard, saw a circle of people wearing Santa hats and singing Christmas carols in Chinese. For the first time, it seemed a little bit to me like real Christmas. They weren't the best singers, but I stayed there at my window listening until they left.

That night, I went to an English-speaking church for the first time since I've been in Taiwan. It was a small church, and the setup was a little bit strange, but the message was good, and at the end we turned off all the lights and lit our candles together and sang Silent Night, just like we do every Christmas Eve. It was familiar enough to remind me that it was really Christmas, which made me a little sad.

On Christmas morning, I had breakfast and presents with Gered, which was nice. Then I went to work. We told the Christmas story in all my classes, and in my teacher classes even ventured to attempt to explain Hanukkah a little bit. There are extremely few Jewish people in Taiwan, so we had a lot of confusion there. One of the teachers brought me a Christmas present, and a number of students gave me cards or little gifts. Patty's 18-year-old daughter gave me a stuffed Care Bear (the pink one, with the rainbow on its stomach), to the great delight/envy of my girl students. Taiwanese people don't generally exchange Christmas presents, but I think a lot of them gave me things because they know that Christmas is important in America, and they want me to feel at home. It was very sweet. That evening, the Fulbright ETAs got together and had a Western-style Christmas dinner (ordered from a nearby hotel), with turkey and mashed potatoes and whatnot. (okay, there might have been dumplings as well) We did quite decently, for Taiwan.

Anyway, it's lame to be away from home for Christmas, but we made the best of it. Also, I got to talk to a lot of people at home recently through the magic of Skype. Hooray!