A very Chinese Christmas
Before I left for China, and even talking to friends outside of China, I'm often asked 'do you miss home?', or 'will you be going home for Christmas?'. And actually I don't miss my family that often, I'm doing such cool things here, which I'm always sharing with my mum on WhatsApp. And no, I didn't go home for Christmas, but this was the one time that I really felt like I missed my family.
Up until now, my whole life, Christmas was the time that we'd come together a celebrate (in a similar way to how Chinese families gather to celebrate Spring Festival). My brothers would come home from university and my grandad would visit. Every year we'd have the same friends over for Christmas Eve and on Christmas morning we'd all be waiting for one of my brothers to wake up (and of course, he hadn't wrapped his presents yet either). We'd eat our roast turkey and have turkey sandwiches in the evening whilst watching a Christmas special on TV.
That's just how my Christmas always goes. But this year was different.
I was in China, I wasn't going home, and in China Christmas isn't as big as it is in other countries.
My flat mate bought a Christmas tree which we decorated, even before the 1st December! A couple of weeks later, another of my flat mates had a Danish Christmas party and COVERED the ceiling in red and green balloons!
Our flat was Christmas central! We even had tinsel above our sink!
Luckily nearly all of my friends were going to be staying in China for Christmas, so we were all together and when Christmas came, we celebrated like a family!
We went out for Christmas dinner...with a twist! I'd booked us a table at a Peking duck restaurant, so we stuffed our faces and had a feast of delicious Chinese food!
During the lunch we each shared a tradition or something our family did at Christmas and if we could think of one, the strangest gift we'd either given or received.
As if we hadn't had enough food for lunch, we went to Dairy Queen and had some ice cream! Then my friend bought monopoly so we went back to campus, a few of us played, whilst some others Skyped family.
Unfortunately for dinner there were no turkey sandwiches and we were back to eating food from our canteen. After dinner we played Monopoly and then things got really fun as we played lots of silly games together.
On Boxing day we cooked the left overs from the restaurant and some left overs from some other friend's Christmas dinner.
Although this Christmas was very different, it was still super fun and I'm happy that I have such a great group of friends to celebrate with! It just goes to show that it doesn't matter where you are or what you do, but it's who you are with that really counts.
