A Chongqing Christmas

We spent this Christmas in Chongqing – a family of four for the first time.  Our last Christmas without extended family and in our own house was 5 long years ago, the same Christmas morning we discovered we were pregnant with Luke.  Luke is now luckily that magical age where Christmas makes sense, and this year was incredible.  We started out in late November getting the Christmas tree and decor up around the house.  It’s always a challenge decorating a new house for the first time, you never know what pieces fit where, if the lights will reach around that bannister, or where to put the Christmas tree.  In the end, we had to buy a bunch of lights, get an extension cord made (they don’t have them here??) and buy about $60 worth of power converters to avoid blowing up our Canadian lights in the 220 voltage.  But it looks fabulous.

So fabulous in fact we decided to hold a little party to have all our friends & neighbours partake in some Christmas cheer.  Kyle and I both have childhood memories of Christmas parties – mine due to my dad’s birthday on December 23, which often had over a hundred people visiting our house – and Kyle’s due to his family’s Christmas Day Open House, which involves another 100 or more people dropping in all day.   Once we started throwing out names for a guest list it was hard to stop – we ended up with 89.  Surely they wouldn’t all come – people have got to have conflicts, right?  Nope!  We woke up the morning of the party truly concerned about how we would fit 89 people into our not-super-huge house on a rainy dark day.  In the end, it worked perfectly.  We had a wonderful mix of festive foods & drinks from various countries, plus over 90 people in the end.  We had big kids upstairs playing Wii, little kids downstairs watching Polar Express and playing with toys, and adults mixed in throughout it all eating and drinking.  It was so much fun we’ll have to do it again next year.

Christmas this year involved introducing Luke & Evelyn to a number of traditions and the magic that really makes Christmas fun.  The advent calendar was visited nightly by Elves who left little notes explaining Christmas traditions and giving the kids an activity or idea of something to do that day.  While the elves sometimes ‘forgot’ to come due to their busy days in the toy workshops, and the artsy beautiful notes they left diminished into scratches on folded paper almost 30 days later, Luke loved it nonetheless.  We talked a lot about Santa, and how he’d get into our chimney-less house.  Mommy decided Santa would probably climb through the skylights in the living room, which on afterthought was a bad choice.  Luke still looks skeptically at them and asks if the dirt he sees are cracks.

Our Christmas was bumped back by a week as we wanted to take advantage of the Long weekend to go to a beach resort in Sanya.  I (another bad choice) decided we’d just wait – Luke is 4 and shouldn’t know when Christmas is anyways, right?  Wrong.  I forgot he has friends, and they talk.  Even more – one of those friends was at the beach with us!  Santa visited his hotel room’s balcony, why didn’t Santa come to ours?  Did we miss Christmas?  It was a long week of much fudging, but I don’t think it scarred him too much.  When the actual day came around it was truly magical.  It was almost more fun than I remember Christmases being back when I believed in Santa.  To bring such excitement and magic to their world was truly incredible.  We had a fabulous Christmas morning, wonderful breakfast, and a great day spent opening and playing with our new gifts.  We invited some friends over for Christmas dinner (a challenge in itself, as turkeys here come whole, with all the bits still in their original places – and our oven was too small to fit the whole thing) – but we had an amazing day nonetheless.

Our first Christmas on our own as a family of 4 was definitely a success, and I loved not having to pack up toys, worry about Christmas lights up at home over the holidays, or deal with jetlag.  I think next year the family should all come here for a Chongqing Christmas!

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