An Unexpectedly Merry Christmas

Friday, December 22nd: 12:00PM - 9:00PM

Today was the winter solstice, which is a common holiday celebrated here in China, and one that I didn't know about until my students introduced it to me via the massive chain text messages they send out to everybody on their contact list, who then sends it out to everyone on their contact list, and I'm sure you know the drill. A common tradition? Eating dumplings. On this day, the winter solstice, you must eat dumplings, so the students were excited all day to go off-campus that night and eat dumplings with their classmates. I received many, many pictures of dumplings this evening, and students waited at restaurants long into the evening to eat their dumplings.

My host mom, cousin and I also shared in the fun - after traversing the city of Wuwei to see a few sights, try a few local foods that my host mom says are not 'authentic' or perhaps just 'mislabeled,' (she is from Chengdu, Sichuan, and many Sichuan dishes are prepared across the country with local flairs, but maintain the same name as the original Sichuan dish; I think we can all find parallels in our own culture and experience!), we decided to stop at a little bakery and grab a quick treat - lightly sweetened and heavily delicious chocolate cake and a fruit dessert that looked better and fresher than it tasted - before heading to my favorite dumpling shop and buying dumplings that we cooked together that evening while we watched the movie, Moana. I am not sure why we picked that one, but it goes great with 麻腐 dumplings!

Saturday, December 23rd: 7:30AM - 4:00PM

This was a nice morning to sleep in after a busy, long and cold day on Friday, and there was a nice surprise when I woke up! My host mother has quickly figured me out, and so she brought a bunch of snacks and treats for our weekend together, lining my living room table with tons of chocolate wafer snacks, Chinese Snickers, chocolate candies from her vacation to Thailand ... so many treats I had diligently worked to cut out of my diet over the last few weeks... Oh, well! It's Christmas, right?

Another surprise? My host mother loves to drink coffee during the winter, so she brought along her French press, coffee beans and grinder for the trip, so she could make some coffee every morning. I'm not the biggest coffee fan, but after a few months drinking basically just water and milk, a nice little homemade latte was pretty delicious, and I enjoyed it a lot.

The surprises don't end there, though. While my host mom doesn't celebrate Christmas, and never has, "It's a foreign holiday," she tells me, she got into the festive spirit this year, and brought along a few gifts for me and her cousin, adding them to our tree collection in the corner of the living room. She even brought a few balloons and a string of small LED lights. We spent a little time this morning decorating my window with the cute snowflake, Santa Claus, and reindeer stickies that my parents send to me in the surprise package a few days ago, then headed out to explore more places in the city.

Saturday, December 23rd: 4:30PM - 11:00PM

This afternoon, we made it back in time to catch the milkman who sells milk every day on campus at 4:30PM. I bought two pounds of milk (yes, sold by the pound - actually 1.1 pounds - here) to make a few desserts for our holiday season.

We arrived back to the apartment and I made a delicious batch of vanilla custard that I've shared on this blog before - my Grandma's recipe! - and we put that in the fridge to cool, after having sufficiently impressed my host mother with my 'baking skills.' It's super easy, I tried to tell her, but she didn't believe me, even after seeing it with her own eyes. Then, we headed to an event with the English club that I helped organize.

One of my favorite holiday movies when I was younger was Home Alone, and this was a movie that I knew my students would love - even if you don't speak English fluently, the movie is still incredibly funny and entertaining, and incorporates a bit of western Christmas culture, as well, so I helped organize the showing this evening. It was a huge success - about 100 students showed up, no one left early, and everyone was laughing the entire time. I received so many messages afterwards thanking me for a great movie and asking me when I will plan another event, so I'd consider this a success.

After the movie ended, my Wuwei host family had invited us to dinner, so my Wuwei host dad picked us up and we went out for a holiday dinner - Wuwei special. We went to a great restaurant in the shopping center of the town and entered a specialty noodle restaurant (all of Gansu has special noodles!) where they made fresh noodles, and then had an entire tray of sauces, spices, oils, vegetables and other toppings that you had to mix in with the noodles and their homemade secret sauce - it was delicious, but the best part was being with both of my Chinese host families and enjoying the holiday weekend together.

After we returned home fairly late, we had some dessert custard (they loved it!) and I used some of the milk we purchased earlier to whip up a batch of cinnamon rolls for my host family the next day - rest, rise, punch, roll, cinnamon sugarize, roll, cut and place in the fridge until the next morning.

Sunday, December 24th: 7:30AM - 12:00PM

Merry Christmas Eve! I remember many Christmas mornings at home where my family would make cinnamon rolls (granted, oftentimes from the exploding cinnamon roll baton purchased at the grocery store), Dad would make coffee, and we would eat breakfast, open presents and stockings, and listen to Christmas music.

Well, this year, the cinnamon rolls and coffee came a day early (I do have to teach and work on Christmas this year...), but it was still a lazy morning enjoying cinnamon rolls, coffee and lounging around before the day truly gets started. It was my host family's first time enjoying cinnamon rolls, or just 'bread' as they called it.

Sunday, December 24th: 12:00PM - 9:00PM

Today is Christmas Eve in my family tradition, but today in China it is also a special day, called 平安夜 (ping an ye), which means 'peaceful night,' and while this name is originally translated from the song 'Silent Night,' the chinese word for apple 苹果 （ping guo) sounds like the Chinese word for peace (both have the 'ping' homophone) and so a tradition is to give your loved ones and friends an apple, to symbolize this peace, and to wish them a peaceful night and year to come. Therefore, the English club (busy this weekend!) had another event this afternoon, from 12:00PM to 4:00PM, where we handed out the traditional apples, placed in a decorated and special box, had students write their wishes for the year on pieces of paper, and played a few games, enjoyed some calligraphy demonstrations, while singing and learning a few Christmas songs. The students did a great job decorating the room for the event, too!

Afterwards, my host family from Chengdu was craving some hot pot (traditional and famous Sichuan food!), so we decided to go and try out a hot pot restaurant in Wuwei - it was pretty delicious and a very enjoyable treat, though it had a Wuwei twist, as my host mother vaguely described without further details.

That evening, the English club got together again to light what many people in the United States call Chinese lanterns; students got together to write their wishes on the lanterns, and then light them and send them off into the sky. A caveat? Most of the students are first year students from small towns, villages around Gansu, and didn't know that lighting these lanterns is actually illegal in cities like Wuwei because they are dangerous. Think: a fire, surrounded by combustible paper, flying low through extremely dry cities filled with buildings.... not the greatest idea, but luckily no one got arrested, and more importantly, no fires were started.

• One of my colleagues in the business department who has become a good friend of mine gave me a chocolate treat during the 10-minute break between classes, which she bought for me when she went to buy her breakfast at the school store.

• The same colleague made me a card that afternoon wishing me a Merry Christmas, and making me laugh a lot, and making me feel both incredibly grateful for such great friends in Wuwei, but also a little sad that I didn't make a card myself - I'll be making it up in the future, though.

(On account of my love of sweets - or at least prior love of super sweet treats! - and baking, along with a little bit of the Chinese cultural gentle way of not shying away from commenting on someone's physical appearance between friends, I seem to have earned the nickname Big Belly. I guess I'll take it?)

• At least a dozen students stopped by over these two days (Christmas Eve and Christmas) to give me a gift they prepared for me, usually an apple in the decorated box from 平安夜，but also an incredibly touching set of two gifts from two of my nursing students, Mary and Alice, who each gave me a gift bag with an apple, a little package of candy, and most meaningful, a set of cards - take a look, and you'll see what why it means so much to me - I won't comment on them, for I think the cards say enough.

• The school officials wanted to thank me for my service and 'on behalf of the school officials, staff, and students, [they] want to wish [me] a Merry Christmas!' so they stopped by my apartment to drop off a bunch of gifts for me - practical useful gifts: chocolates, snacks, tons of fruit (20 bananas, 10 apples, a watermelon, cantaloupe, pomelo) and a box of at least 5 dozen chicken eggs - let's say that I won't need to go shopping myself for a bit, or eat anything besides eggs and fruit for that matter.