Christmas Day

Unfortunately, since China does not celebrate Christmas, we had to work through Christmas Eve day. The night of Christmas Eve we had several Chinese friends over for dinner and to decorate sugar cookies. They had never seen or done anything like it before so they were very curious and had a lot of fun decorating them. Some of them thought they were way too sweet to eat.

One of the people who came over is Adam's student. His English name is Lollipop. He's a super sweet boy who's always been very kind to us. He brought some fun presents for the girls and homemade dumplings that his mom made for us. He was really touched by getting to spend the evening with us.

As fun as the party was, we were still a bit sad because our dear friends just don't understand the depth of Love and Joy that is behind Christmas. Sure we had a good time, but it is our daily prayer that they would be able to experience in their hearts and lives the true meaning of Christmas. Here in China it's just the best shopping day, basically like America's "black Friday." It makes us sad, I wonder how Jesus feels.

We told Sophia she could sleep on the couch by the Christmas tree. She was so excited. I was on the other couch and instantly fell asleep, but Sophia just layed there, eyes wide open, staring at the Christmas tree. She was just too excited, so finally at 11:00 we had to move her to her bed so she'd finally get some sleep.

Christmas day we of course read the Christmas story, ate cinnamon rolls, opened gifts, and talked with our families on the phone. Amazingly it had snowed a bit overnight so there was a dusting of white snow in the morning!

Now we're back to teaching for a few more days. Tuesday we celebrate Elise's 1st birthday!!! Then we're headed to Hainan Island (near Hong Kong) on Wednesday. We're going to meet up with some of our best friends, Stu and Barb Strother. They'll be leading their business study abroad trip from APU to the island and we're going to visit them and also give some talks to their students. We're really excited about the chance to see good friends, be in warm weather, and share with these college students about the great opportunity of teaching English in China with a purpose.