The season between Thanksgiving and the New Year is a time of looking back and looking forward. We look back on the things we are grateful for and remember the previous year. We look forward to Christmas (you know, Advent) and look to the promises the New Year brings. We are first of all thankful for all our friends and family in America who remember us every day or week. Whether sending an e-mail or a message on Facebook, mailing a Christmas card or calling us on Skype, we feel your love and appreciate your thoughts on our behalf.We are also very thankful for our new apartment. There has been a lot of drama concerning this apartment (check out Laurie’s epic posts below) but we are finally getting settled into our new place and making it home. Seth has a ton of room to run around in and has his own play area. We finally have a full-sized kitchen with a very expensive oven that we had to purchase ourselves. It has totally been worth every dollar as we’ve had cookies, cakes, brownies, and casseroles, and for Christmas dinner we’ll have home-made manicotti and New York style cheesecake.
The best part of the new apartment is that it has allowed us to actually have guests over. Our old place was small, dirty, and had a gatekeeper downstairs to keep all non-teachers out. We were in a “guest house.” Not so here. In fact, we had several Chinese friends over to a Thanksgiving dinner. Laurie did a fabulous job getting it as close to an American dinner as possible, only with chicken instead of turkey. We even went around the table to say what we were each thankful for.
While Laurie has taught previously, Benjamin is finishing his first year teaching. It isn’t something that he chose as a career, but he has adapted fairly quickly and is enjoying it, especially teaching business math. Both of us seem to like it here and plan on staying for awhile, though Laurie finds routine job searching cathartic for dealing with the pressures of the job. Seth continues to grow and learn. He is always amazing us with the things he understands and is able to do. We are grateful for his experience growing up in two cultures. It won’t be long until he surpasses us in his Chinese, though right now he is still simply processing the dual language environment.As we look to the next year, Laurie and Benjamin will be celebrating their five-year anniversary with a trip to Sanya in Hainan Province. (Hainan is called “the Hawaii of China.”) Seth will start pre-school in the fall and hopefully make a lot of new friends. We also hope to continue with our teaching jobs and, most importantly, develop more and deeper friendships with both Chinese and foreigners.
While many American Christians complain about the secularization and commercialization of Christmas, here in China we are thrilled to see any signs of the holiday. It’s hard to believe Christmas will be here next week when, unlike most of you, we haven’t been looking at apartment store decorations and listening to carols played over loudspeakers since October. We have to remind ourselves every day that the season of Christ’s birth is upon us, and in the spirit of joy and peace that our Savior has brought us, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and the happiest of New Years.
