Title: Christmas in July

Thursday was our final day of teaching. We decided to wrap things up with a party during the each class. We spend Wednesday making stockings and Thursday we had a Christmas in July.

We have to be careful what we say about Christmas. I wish we could go through the real reason for the season, but we reminded ourselves in the morning that we are but a link in a chain. Introducing the idea of Christmas might be just the first little seed that grows a long time after we are gone.

Anyway, it was so much fun to see their faces when they looked in their stockings! It really did sound like Christmas morning! There were squeals of delight and excitement, it was great! The little ones dove right in and dumped everything out while the older kids were very Chinese in their behavior. It is common to not open a gift in front of the giver in the Chinese custom, but I could see them quickly peeking inside and trying to see if it was going to be ok to open it. We encouraged them and they finally went to it. We only had modest gifts for them. We put a pencil, eraser, pad of paper, candy, a balloon, and a couple rubber bands in each stocking. Oh, and a toothbrush. We have been collecting the toothbrushes from the hotel so we had enough to go around! It was really fun!

We also had the kids make pipe-cleaner decorations for the tree mom hauled from home. We found a strand of Christmas lights next door at the 2 kuai store (the Chinese equivalent of the dollar store) and they even blinked! I think when you see the pictures you will agree that it looked like Christmas yesterday!

After the stockings were opened and the candy was eaten, we had to say goodbye. How can you become so attached in such a short time? It was really hard, especially knowing that we will never see these kiddos again. We got hugs from a lot of the little ones, but even as we said goodbye and I told them in Chinese that we were flying on a plane back to America, they still said "See you tomorrow!" Ugh. That was hard.

Well, I will treasure these memories in my heart forever. We have been so blessed to even be a part of their lives for a short month.