Feliz 圣诞节, and a Happy New Year!

Christmas is a wonderful time of the year! Everyone is filled with a certain spirit that makes life seem a little bit more festive and joyous, people are more inclined to share. That is, of course, only if you live in a place where Christmas is celebrated, which China does not happen to be.
But fret not! In the absence of a general Christmas spirit, one only needs to create said spirit within oneself and with those around you.
Which is exactly what we did!
Well, that's what the girls did. We decided that baking sugar cookies was a must do, even here in China. So we divid up the ingredients and went over to a families home in our ward, as the apartments we were renting did not come equipped with ovens. We had fun mixing up the dough and creating fun sugar cookie shapes. We did not have cookie cutters, so we improvised with plastic knives. This permitted us to be very creative in our cookie shapes. In my personal opinion the cookies were amazing!!! We baked up all the dough and took them back into town with us on the subway. We had a hot pot dinner later in the week and decided to have everyone get together afterwards to frost them and enjoy them. It turned out to be a perfect combination. Everyone enjoyed the cookies and company. Being gathered together with all of our friends was almost as good as being with our families.

One of the highlights of this season was the baptism of one of our friends, a fellow student from the flagship program, Ellison! He had come to church with us for a while and now the day of his baptism had come. Seeing that a chapel with a regular baptismal font was not available and the water in the nearby lake was neither warm nor sanitary, the baptism was scheduled to take place in an apartment complex with a spa and a pool. The meeting itself was wonderful. On a chilly sunday morning, at the crack of dawn we made our way to the apartment, where we met up with other students, members and friends. Some wonderful talks were given and the spirit of the event was truly special. 

Whatever Christmas spirit I might have felt was missing was certainly not missing then. It was great to see everyone gathered together to such an important event and feel the spirit and the happiness.

But wait, there's more! Our Nanjing church branch has already proven itself to come to the rescue when poor expats are longing for some familiarity when they put on a Thanksgiving party and they would deliver again with a Christmas party.

The group was much smaller than at Thanksgiving, as most people have enough sense to go home to their families during the Christmas season. But on the upside, that meant that there was more food left for those of us who stayed in the southern capital. There was enough of home cookin' and carol singing to make even the dreariest of seasons bright.
But we did not have enough yet! Jenn and I put together yet another Christmas party on Christmas Eve and Jenn decorated the apartment with paper snowflakes of increasing complexity hung from the ceiling with dental floss. Following the tradition of one of our friends, we ordered Pizza for our Christmas Eve Dinner. Plenty of friends arrived and we had a wonderful evening of good conversation, delicious food and finding out what kind of English we speak (as an explanation: A little while ago, there was this quiz going around on facebook which asked you a bunch of pronunciation and vocabulary questions and then proceeded to tell you where your style of English came from in the US. The whole thing seemed pretty scientific, I think it was from the New York Times. In any case, I got Salt Lake City. Or Boise.) We rounded up the evening with yet another round of carol and hymn singing and we read the Christmas story. Merry Christmas indeed!
But for us world-traveling maniacs, such a perfect Christmas would be too boring. So we got food poisoning. Or another stomach bug of some kind. Jenn got sick on Sunday, two days before Christmas and I got sick on Christmas Eve/ Christmas Day. It made for a much more varied Christmas experience than I am used to, albeit one spend more laying in bed than walking around and enjoying life.

Our Advent Calendar! We were true and faithful in opening it each day!

Daniel's New Outfit :) 

Our "Christmas" Dinner

But ill or well, sick or healthy, it was a good Christmas in the Far East, which also included many wonderful presents! I got a complet new outfit and a book telling how Doctors think. Turns out, they think a lot, but not always correctly! Jenn got enough material to throw herself into a cross-stitching frenzy and other great things. What made my German heart proud is that she especially enjoyed the "Stollen" we got from home, almost more than I did! (Stollen is, simply put, a type of German Christmas cake, although "cake" does not describe it correctly. You'll have to try it yourself!)