Disbrows In Korea: Christmas in Korea.

I (Traylor) am writing this on January 29, 2013 (Korea time) and the last blog that we did was on August. I feel both embarrassed and little bit of shame for not keeping everyone in the loop of our lives over the past…sigh… five months. Regardless, that means we have so much to share with the few people who read our blog.

Since August we have been: persevering through our job at POLY, had a handful of typhoon scares, had a number of our students leave our classes, experienced a Korean Christmas, went to the Philippines, made it safely back from the Philippines, went to an indoor waterpark for kids with an ice house carved in the outside, and somehow made it to the end of January with only four or five weeks remaining in our contracts at POLY. Hannah and I agreed to write different parts of the blog to catch up and I am first up, so I will talk about our Christmas in Korea.

Our Christmas here really centered on what our school was doing leading up to the holiday. We get one day off for Christmas ‘vacation’, and, that day is Christmas Day. Our school has a big Christmas gathering where our morning students (3-7 year olds) sing songs for their parents and they all clap and cheer and everything is happy and fun for the parents. On the other end of that are the Korean teachers and us who started preparing for this forty minutes of chaos around our American Thanksgiving, so about the third week of November.

I love everything about the Christmas holiday: the old Perry Como songs, the lights, the trees, the stockings. I love it all. So, I started pumping Christmas music into my kids around week three of November. We chose “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer” to sing and create a dance with and Hannah’s class sang “Jingle Bells”. My class also sang “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” with a dance with the other class their age. Since these kids are on display for their parents, we both ended up practicing these songs to the point where my kids were sick of “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer” by week two of December.

We ended up persevering through all of the stress that is put on teachers and kids for perfection (I think kids’ plays are better with a little ‘goofing around’ and when kids aren’t on-key with their voices, but that may just be me) and made it through the performance. Thankfully, I have a girl named ‘Rosie’, who sings her little guts out at everything, carried my class through the performance. She is, by far, the loudest girl at our school when she sings, or when she yells at other students. Her mom is a police officer so I think she gets some of it from her mommy.

We came back from the performance and all of the parents brought food and we had a little social at our school with all of the teachers and parents. The moms brought all kinds of food that they thought we would like: Pizza Hut pizza, fried chicken, cheese, and fruits. They also made a lot of Korean foods as well: noodles, fish, rice balls, fish balls, and a lot of kimchee. It was great sitting with our parents and getting to discuss their kids (in broken English) with them as we rarely get to experience that. The next day we had Santa come to our school. Santa was a random foreigner who was paid 50 bucks to come and give out presents to our kids that their moms had bought. Our school really tried to have a ‘western’ Christmas, and, of course, Santa is part of that. It was really special to get to see our kids opening up gifts for Christmas. A lot of our kids got a stuffed dog named Brownie (look it up) that is essentially a stuffed blue eyed malamute that you could win from throwing darts at the fair, but some marketing genius in Korea has swooned our kids into wanting it, and most of them got it. Legos are really popular here as well (Ninja-go) as well as Transformers. A lot of our girls got dresses and things like that; I think I’m ready to be a daddy after experiencing all of that.

After that we had Christmas Day and we celebrated that by having a brunch at our friends, Chris and Leah’s apartment. My awesome wife made some mean hash browns and pancakes with real syrup. Leah made bacon and eggs. It was one of the most delicious meals I’ve eaten in quite a while. It made me feel like I was in Wagener with my grandma and the rest of my family.

One of the best things about Christmas was that my friend Mark came to visit from Africa. He is working for CURE and came and visited his girlfriend over the break and they also made a stop by Changwon during Christmas, it was truly a blessing to get to see him for the short amount of time that I did.

Christmas is Korea is a little different than in America. We came into Christmas thinking it would be hard to find Christmas lights around our city and that it would be a dreary place over the holidays. Korea certainly doesn’t have the ‘magic’ or ‘commercialization’ of Christmas that the states has, but we were surprised by the amount of decorations we saw. We had a GIANT Christmas tree in the middle of our city (in the middle of a rotary) that was always lit up and our local malls had Christmas lights and trees as well so that was nice. Christmas in Korea seemed like Korea was about 30 years behind where America is on the holiday and they rapidly threw up some things regarding Christmas. Some of it was comforting for us and some of it was just comical (Santa with Angel’s wings).