Our Christmas 2022

Each year, we pick a Christmas theme plan activities, devotionals and present-opening requirements around that theme.  We quite like it.  It helps us stay focused on Jesus Christ for the whole month. Greta says it's her favorite thing about Christmas.  This year our theme was "Choose Christ".  I made these posters and hung them around the house.  They will stay up for the year reminding us of our theme.

For our Christmas Kick Off activity in November, we flipped a coin to decide whether we were going out for dinner at McDonald's or KFC.  Once there, we used a random number generator to determine which item we were getting. We got KFC #9, which was a hamburger.  The girls were so upset that they didn't get to choose. (At that point they didn't know it was the Christmas Kick Off and just thought we were being unreasonable.)  Hamburgers in China are not recommended and from KFC, it was an especially terrible outcome. But that was the point. We love having a choice.  A bit later we got food from Rice Paper, a Vietnamese restaurant with good reviews, where they got to choose.  We talked about how wonderful of a gift it is to be able to choose, but with that gift, we must choose wisely.  And, we have to accept responsibility for our choices.  It was okay not to eat the KFC #9, but they had to accept the outcome of their choices at Rice Paper.  

Since the focus was on choice, the girls each picked 3 outfits for each other for the majority of the Christmas gifts.  Because things are so cheap in China, that included shoes and jewelry.  However, the wonkiness of shopping on Taobao, made it more like 4.5 outfits.  They had a lot of fun choosing for each other.  And that gave them a greater experience than they have ever had of how fun it is to be on the giving side for our family Christmas.  

For our Christmas day activities we played a spin off of The Price is Right and played "The Choice is Right".  It worked quite a bit like the actual game show, but if they made wrong choices in the game, they could 'repent' to obtain the rewards.  The repentance process was to present a mini devotional on the importance of choice and choosing Jesus Christ.  It worked well because we talked quite a bit through the month about the ability to make poor choices right through repentance.

We had items up for bid, which were always unwrapped.  We had different ways of unveiling those.  They wrote their guesses on a marker board.  It was hilarious because they had to guess the prices in yuan, which is a lottery in and of itself.  Sometimes things are insanely cheap here, and other times they are more normally priced and when you are guessing you have no clue as to which way to go.  

In the Price is Right, they have the prizes behind closed doors, but we thought the girls would like to open a few gifts.  So sometimes the clothes came out wrapped in their actual shapes.  We wanted some element of surprise and opening for Christmas, but retain the ability to 'describe' the 'prizes'.  Our descriptions were nonsense things like "These lovely striped snow pants are beautifully patterned and are a must-have for this year's fashion."  It turned out to be really fun. Note in the top picture a necklace is wrapped in its shape.  The whole shape wrapping was a bit of a hair-brained headache (but worth it!), however after wrapping one necklace, that shape quickly got the ax. I even wanted to wrap the shoes like that, but the necklace quickly cured me of that!

Sometimes the clothes for the pricing games came out on a model.  When Tom is a model for teenage clothes, then you're in for some good laughs.  He claims he should quit his day job to model clothes for teen girls. Think that would bring in enough?

The story on the tie is that Tessa thought she was ordering a nice tie for Tom, but it came as a zipper tie.  So we had some good laughs over that all Christmas.  

Here are a few pictures from the games. This is the Spelling Bee game, but they had to spell the word "Jesus"

This was our mini punch board

Guessing whether the first digit was right, or the second digit was right.

Higher or lower on the dice game.

For the showcase show down, they also got a chair with an outfit to make it a prize package beyond what they had received earlier.  Greta got a chair for school and Tessa got a guitar chair. (Both ultra cheap here.) Of course neither girl won their games very often because of the randomness of Taobao pricing, but they ended up with everything because they chose to repent.  It was a great day and a great theme.

Our Christmas day service project was supposed to be the open house, but that didn't fly, so we had to pinch hit.  It worked out well with a Christmas theme on choice to have the girls each decide how they were going to serve outside of the house.  They both decided to take out some wrapped candied nuts to give to people and wish them a Merry Christmas.  That was a bit difficult because they don't celebrate Christmas here and the people we approached were hesitant to take it.  In the US, we'd be more cautious of stranger danger and taking a treat from a stranger, but here it was more of a I don't want to take from you because then I would owe you.  Tessa and I finally came into our complex where people at least have seen us and knew that we were just being friendly and we had success.  Tom and Greta went over near the mall and they had great difficulty giving them away even with Tom's language skills and him telling them what it was.  It wasn't our best Christmas day service project, but we insist on doing them because it gets us out of the house and focusing on someone besides ourselves on a day where it is so easy to feel selfish. 

All in all, it was a great day and a wonderful Christmas season.  We missed home terribly, but we were still able to carry out this important tradition.