"We wish you a merry chrit-mat" : Sharing Christmas at Nita School

Hello and a very belated merry Christmas blog entry!
I really enjoyed the holiday season here in Laos. For one thing, it meant getting to do fun Christmas activities in my classes at school! I taught them Christmas songs (Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas were the easiest, but I tried out Deck the Halls and a few others with M4A - they're one of my best, most enthusiastic classes!). I loved getting to play "music teacher" at the end of every class period all of December! The kids loved learning the songs and by the end of the month "jingle bells" could be heard breaking out randomly in the corridors and courtyards.

Also, it was just the cutest thing ever to have these tiny little primary school students come up to you and say "merry christmas" during recess and lunch times, because Whitney was doing a great job teaching even the littlest P1 and P2 students about Christmas. (or more like "melly chritmat" since the lao language doesnt have the letter/sound of "r" and the letter/sound "s" is not a final consonant (meaning you can never end a syllable with that letter. thus, the sound of "Chris-mas" would be tricky...)


I also had my classes make Christmas cards. Even though I told them to give it to a friend, many many students gave their cards to me! I have a whole section of my room decorated with their pictures and cute messages. Most just wrote the standard "merry Christmas and happy new year" but I did get a few more creative ones that included sayings like "i love teacher lisa" and "i wish you beautiful and happy forever." My favorite was a really sweet girl who wrote "we very happy have teacher lisa come teach us. want to teach us forever. you're very fun. you smile is very big and beautiful." =) I did the Christmas card activity just to let them have some fun and review some vocab (Christmas tree, snowman, etc.). Little did I know I would be receiving so much love and affirmation!! it was a great Christmas present. (unfortunately, I haven't taken a picture of the wall of cards in my room. i'll have to do that soon.)

Another Christmas-y activity at school was that Whitney and I baked Christmas cookies to give to all the teachers and staff! We had to do it one saturday at Wendy's house (the MCC laos country program administrator, aka my boss) because our host families both don't have ovens (very standard for Lao kitchens. they dont do oven/stove-top cooking. it's all over a fire or in an electric wok!)We had a great time baking the cookies (complete with cookie cutters and red and green icing)...and the teachers loved eating them! We we're really pleasantly surprised to see them so excited about the cookies!!
Most Lao dessert is really not very sweet, so we were a little concerned about how they would like sugar cookies with icing and sprinkles, but most of them really loved it!

And finally...the big day. Friday. Christmas Eve. Every friday morning Nita school has a little assembly time first thing, from 8 to 8:30. Since we still had school on Christmas Eve (remember, Vientiane is 90% Buddhist...so even though they know quite a bit about Christmas, they don't celebrate it (santa is known here...he just doesn't come...), Whitney and I asked if we could come up during the assembly to lead the kids in a sing-a-long with the two songs we had both been teaching in our classes: Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas. Everyone was very excited about this idea, so we did it! It was great fun! We both stood up on the little stage area, while the entire student body stood either out in front of us in the courtyard or some of the kids surrounded the stage from the balcony above too, as you can see from the pictures below.