Even the Wise Men Went West for Christmas

Wednesday already? And another week bites the dust. Have I done anything? Let’s think back:

Thursday: work. Friday: work. Saturday and Sunday: work. Monday: work. Tuesday: sleep. errands. Wednesday: cookies. My goodness, how exciting is my life? Actually, the only thing I really did this week was resolve to write more interesting and profound blog posts, and it looks like I’ll be failing miserably at that!

           

Well, actually, I do have a few stories to relate. Last week at work, I had to cover a couple of classes for coworkers on vacation. They were, respectively, a class for 4 year olds and a class for for 5-6 year olds. Good heavens. It’s a whole different ball game with the wee ones, innit? It reminded me of my semester working a couple of hours a week in a kindergarten. As cute as they are, and as relatively easy it is to plan and execute a lesson for them, I’m rather certain that early childhood education is not for me.

Also, it’s gotten a bit chilly in Guangzhou. I think winter has finally arrived.  When I say it’s chilly, I mean it’s been in the 60s during the day and the 50s at night. Now, that isn’t really cold, I know. But be honest: it is the temperature at which you start running the furnace. And there’s no heat at work. There’s no heat in my apartment. It’s cool enough in my apartment today that I’m wishing for my fingerless typing mitts.

Even running the oven all morning didn’t really warm it up (likely because my oven is the size of a breadbox). But add coffee, tea, company, and cookies, and it was a warm and cheerful morning. I had a few friends over for some Christmas cooking making today. We made sugar cookies and vegan gingerbread cookies.  Here is my tip of the day: use fresh ginger in your cookies. Seriously, the flavor is outstanding. The spices, the sugar, and the bite of the ginger, yum. I have leftover molasses, and I think, as soon as I dispose of the four dozen cookies I now have in my apartment, that I might try making gingerbread. I’ll need to find a baking dish, though. (The cookies were made on a sheet of tin foil placed directly on the wire rack of the oven. It worked fine.) We listened to some Christmas carols, watched last year’s Doctor Who Christmas episode, and decorated the cookies with white icing, crushed up candy canes, and mini M&Ms. I couldn’t find food dye or colored sugar, not that I looked very hard, but I think they came out pretty well. They’re certainly delicious.

I was going to make smörbullar, too, but I figured we’d made enough cookies for one day. I’m going to take the remaining cookies in to our school Christmas party tomorrow. And if I’m feeling particularly nice, I might make some cookies next weekend for my Christmas Eve classes.

I’m getting excited for Christmas, but I keep having flashes of memory, at random moments, about all the things I might be doing at home this time of year. The kids at school will be gearing up for finals. LL Bean will be decorated and having fun events. The various Bowdoin choral and musical groups will be holding concerts. The First Parish bellringers will be ringing their way around the local churches. I can close my eyes and be in a thousand moments: breathing in cold air, sipping too-sweet cocoa, scraping snow off my windshield, testing the thin ice on the muddy puddles whilst in search of the perfect tree.  I can recreate a lot of Christmas here: cookies, tinsel, candles, carols. But I can’t make it snow and I can’t make it smell like evergreens. There’s a tree and decorations in the lobby of my building, now, but I can’t make the people in this city feel Christmas joy. There’s no connection. It feels like Christmas in July – all the trappings, none of the spirit.

Well, it is as it is and that is how it is. I’m looking forward to Spring Festival. Maybe that will make up for sense of emptiness that I just can’t shake.

I’ve gone and made this post a tad depressing, haven’t I? Well, let’s dispel these gloomy clouds, and sum up this surprisingly long blog post, with a great joke for your next party. Should you find that the rum is all gone (or the cookies, or the cake, or the little carrots, whatever) you should turn to a friend and remark, “Maybe if we stop observing it, it will appear!” That’s right, Copenhagen Interpretation jokes*, FOR THE WIN. Why yes, I am currently reading a book about Einstein, Gödel, and early 20^th century physics, why do you ask?

*This joke was told to me by an online friend, after I wowed them with the classic math pick-up line: I wish I was your derivative so I could lay tangent to your curves. Math and science humor will never not be funny, and you know it.