Christmas at the car wash

A couple weekends ago we went back to visit our friends at the car wash to have a Christmas party.  I'm pretty sure it was the first Christmas party any of the kids had ever had.  We had no idea how many kids to expect since the times we had gone in the past there were at most 3-4 kids that really interacted with us.  Well much to our delight, there were 11 or 12 kids crammed into one small room to celebrate with us!

We brought a small Christmas tree and some ornaments, and it was a great hit!  Everyone wanted to help decorate, and the tree kept toppling from all the enthusiasm.  We sang some Christmas songs in Chinese and talked about the tradition of giving gifts.  Then we let each kid choose one of the small gifts we had brought and they were so excited!  Afterwards we used some of our nativity figurines to tell them the story of Jesus' birth and had an impromptu English lesson including such very useful words as "angel", "camel", and "wise men".

It was so fun to have a small opportunity to bring joy to these families!  It was encouraging that so many came, and it made us feel like the community is beginning to realize that we really do care and are committed to helping as we can.  More English lessons are in the future!

Decorating the tree chaos

The boys liked to pick up Elijah :)  I promise the tree did look better in the end

Santa Jeff leading Christmas carols

Whenever not being hauled around, Elijah just sat there and stared at a comic book of his current obsession, a Chinese cartoon character called Happy Sheep

But he was hauled around a lot :)