White (Elephant) Christmas

 Merry Christmas, from Mathayom English!

It's not exactly fun to have to work on Christmas Day, but this year we ajarn farang made the most of it and approached the holiday with a kind of manic excitement, that while admittedly a bit forced, actually ended up making for quite a festive Christmas... until our sugar crash around 2pm. Actually, I didn't really mind having to go in to work today. If I'm going to be away from home, I can't think of anyone I would rather spend Christmas with than my friends from the Mathayom English Department.

We are returning midterm exams to the students today and tomorrow, and our crazy schedule (I was scheduled to return two important exams during the same period block) was interspersed with Christmas festivities. Last year we didn't really do anything for Christmas, and it was lame and boring. This year, we all decided to be as festive as possible... we even broke the rules by wearing red instead of yellow today! There were no official Christmas activities at Mathayom (there's a really stressful Christmas show every year at Prathom), but we basically had a day-long Christmas party in our office.

Geoffrey dug out his old Christmas cassettes, and I spent a good half hour trying to get our cassette player to work. Suzie came in to the office today to bring us all our Christmas gifts: homemade peppermint bark!

Rudolph, Santa, elf, and James

Suzie has been teaching a special conversation class to the teachers over at our vocational campus, and today she had planned a lesson about Christmas with a "present stealing game". We can't call it a "white elephant" exchange, because that actually refers to an event during the American Civil War when King Rama VI of Siam sent war elephants to Abraham Lincoln. It was a nice though, but not a very practical or useful gift. Suzie had wrapped several little things to use in her lesson, but just before lunch the vocational school called to cancel their lesson today. Instead, we played the white elephant game in our office. We had a lot of fun, and it didn't matter that everyone walking past our office looked in at us like we were crazy.

We successfully kept the spirit alive all day, despite the afternoon sugar crash. Luckily I keep a bottle of Tylenol in my drawer, and we passed it around the office. It was hard to stay awake to get through my final 2:40 class this afternoon, but all the students were so sweet and excited to wish us a Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas from Bangkok 2014!