Christmas 2011: Taw Saeng

Christmas was wonderful this year! It started with decorating our house. Sophie and I bought a live Christmas tree from the flower market and got decorations from the Christmas store in the big open air market (Gad Luang) near our house. We put on Christmas music and decorated with Maiko. We put ornaments on the tree and hung Christmas lights outside. It was fun, even though our little tree looks like the one from Charlie Brown Christmas. But, that is why I love it. J Then, Maiko and P’Dtip (who is helping her with the house church) decorated the walls with ribbon and hung live roses with little pockets of water all over the walls and hung ribbon in our courtyard too. It looked so pretty!

We also had a great Christmas program at Taw Saeng this year! In the past, Taw Saeng has bought snacks for the families to eat during the Christmas party, but this year we decided to use Hollie’s baking kitchen and bake goodies instead. It was so fun, despite the fact that I was sick with bronchitis (typical for this time of year). I felt pretty lame driving around with my sweatshirt and scarf while seeing all these tourists running around in shorts and tank tops.

Anyway, we decided to make homemade cinnamon rolls, brownies, chocolate chip cookies and sugar cookies for the party. Franziska, Ahna, Ning and I went to the kitchen at the Kijkandee head office Tuesday, Wed and Thursday morning to bake for hours. It was so fun, but the oven ran out of gas on Thursday morning!! We had a mild panic attack, but luckily, P’Mary was there (she’s the cleaning lady, and is super sweet) so she called the guy to bring us a new tank. Crisis averted.

We decorated with some stuff we had upstairs, including our fake Christmas tree and lots of ornaments. We had the kids make angels and decorate them, then we got them laminated and hung them up from the rafters with stars and other decorations we had been making. We also made snowflakes and hung Christmas lights around our little patio area for people going by to see. It was so cool to see the whole place done up for the holidays!

We had been practicing with the kids for weeks for the program. We had Franziska’s kids doing a hip hop dance with the younger boys (SO cute to watch!), Ning had Sunny, Sophie, Willow and Yvonne do a traditional Thai dance, Ahna taught the littler girls a fun dance to a pop version of Away in a Manger, we had the older boys doing a song on their guitars, and my girls (Winnie, Amelie and Miriam) do their songs on the piano.

So many family members came out for the performance and it was so exciting! We started with the kids singing a Thai Christmas song while Ahna and I accompanied on harp and guitar, then they sang Silent Night in English and sign language, then in Thai, then we started with the performances. I felt like I was running around all night doing something for setup or videoing or playing guitar. It was really fun, but it all happened so fast! I was so proud of my girls playing their songs. They all had them memorized and they did a great job even though they didn’t play perfectly. For their first performance in front of anyone other than me, they were amazing! I was so excited to have their parents come see too, because I know they must be so proud of their kids as well. It’s really cool to be able to teach them piano, because there is no way they would ever be able to afford lessons or have a place to play without Taw Saeng. I know that playing piano for me is so therapeutic, so I think it’s kind of like music therapy for them too, since they have had so much stress in their lives. 

It was so fun to watch Sophie dance too because I have only ever seen pictures of her dancing before and never seen it live. She was the best of the girls because she is oldest, but it was so funny because she was concentrating so hard that she looked super serious, while all the other girls had big smiles on their faces. Every time she would look at me, I’d be like “Smile!!” and she would smile for about 10 seconds, and then go back to her concentration face. It’s pretty funny to watch the video of it.