Christmas is a comin'

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve! I can't help but have mixed feelings about the holidays this year, especially since we'll be spending it without family. It's Dean's 2nd Christmas, and at 17 months old we think he's going to get into the groove of opening presents very quickly. I'm really looking forward to his excitement and giggles when we first rip into the packages under the tree.

We bought an artificial tree and lights at Walmart in Shenzhen. The tree is 6' tall and the lights are colored LED's that twinkle. It took 2 strands to make it around the tree, but they aren't designed to plug into each other, so the top half of the tree does one pattern of blinking while the bottom half does a different blinking pattern. At first, Matt constantly tried to sinc the lights so the tree would look uniform, but Dean always manages to find the control boxes tucked into the branches. He clicks a few times and then the lights are off dancing in different patterns again.

We decorated the tree with homemade ornaments. Around Thanksgiving I met a new friend with 2 young boys, and her apartment in the same complex we live in has an oven. Oh, what a luxury! We only have a gas burner in our place, but I digress... Sarah invited us over to make salt-dough ornaments the first weekend in Dec. We baked them in her oven, and then the following Saturday she came over to our place with her boys and together we painted the ornaments using Folkart paint from my office. When they were dry, we tied ribbon on them and hung them from the tree.

As for Christmas gifts, we were fortunate to have both sets of Dean's grandparents visit us in the month of November, and they brought lots of gifts in their suitcases. Matt's parents came first and they brought the gifts unwrapped, thinking they could get gift paper here to wrap the presents. No luck! So the gifts are wrapped beautifully in Shenzhen Daily newspapers and black trash bags. We warned my parents that we couldn't find wrapping paper, so they wrapped the gifts in advance. We eventually found very small rolls of paper with holiday Disney characters on them at Walmart. When I say small I mean there's hardly enough on the roll to wrap a shoebox, but we're making it work.

It's surprising how many Christmas decorations there are around the city. I'm told it hasn't always been this way, but that the influence from once British governed Hong Kong is the cause, particularly in the past 5 years. The Coastal City mall next to my office put up elaborate sleighs and snow-themed decorations throughout, some with moving parts. My favorite "scene" is a set of 3 penguins that dance and strum guitars while singing. It's something you would expect to see on a Disney ride. The Garden City mall near our apartment, on the other hand, took the decorations in a different direction. There's a giant pink bunny standing just inside the entrance surrounded by red poinsettias. Move over Santa, the Easter bunny is taking over.

Speaking of Santa, I saw him last night at the Coastal City mall. He is the skinniest Santa I've ever seen! Tall and scrawny, with dark black sideburns peeking out from under his white "hair" and beard. I hope to take Dean to the mall tomorrow to get a picture with him, and we might need to borrow Sarah's oven to bake extra cookies to set out.