Christmas! :D

The most lights in one spot in Ulsan
This is all of them.

Merry Christmas everyone!  I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas day whether you celebrate or not.  Trevor and I had a different sort of Christmas considering Christianity (or even the secular tradition of Santa and all that) isn't quite as popular here as it is back home.  Those who do celebrate Christmas here don't do it to the extent that is traditional in the states.  Thankfully, the gospel is the same wherever you go so we had a whole church family to celebrate with us.  In fact, our ward Christmas party was on Christmas day, but more on that later.

As you may have seen on our last post, Trevor and I made our own Christmas tree because we didn't want to buy one since we will only be here one year and they are just too expensive here.  I also made a red and green chain to string along our patio window and drew a manger scene on our sliding glass door.  Even with all our efforts, it still seemed much less like Christmas than we are used to.  There aren't usually Christmas lights on trees and houses everywhere you look and snow on the sidewalks and perfect gift ideas in every store.  I'll admit I was kind of sad to not get the type of Christmas I'm used to.  Don't worry though, Trevor and I tried our best to make it as good as we could and we did have a really good Christmas day.

Christmas morning we woke up and opened presents.  We had presents from each other and then both of our families sent a package (mine was mostly from my sister Ashley who had me this year on our family rotation).  We really enjoyed getting some American goodies.  As usual, my sweetheart spoiled me more than he should have.  After presents, we spent some time skyping our families.

We had invited the 3 sister missionaries over for breakfast and offered them to use our computers to skype their families. We had pancakes and bacon and eggs and the sisters really seemed to enjoy being able to see their families for a while which made me happy.  After they left, I had to quickly get ready for the day because I had to go to the church early to help the Relief Society (women's organization at our church) get ready for our performance.

Performance? you ask? What performance?  Well for part of the Christmas party, our ward was having a sort of talent show and the Relief Society wanted to do a group dance which they asked me to choreograph.  Koreans love to be perfect at everything they do so even though the party didn't start till 5pm they all wanted to meet at 3 to practice the dance (keep in mind we have been practicing this once a week all of December).  Since I was the one who choreographed it, I got to teach it to everyone which can, in truth, be frustrating because of the language barrier.  With the help of one sister who speaks English really well and the helpful actions of Trevor queuing everybody on what came next, we got the dance down pat.  I will post a video of it below.  I also put together the music for the dance so hopefully you can hear that.  It was supposed to be a bit comedic so it's ok to laugh I will not be offended ;).

The rest of the talent show comprised of other little dances and musical numbers and such and everybody did such a good job.  Trevor and I did some swing dancing and everybody went completely nuts over it.  They even made us do some more at the end of the program.  I will also post a video of that for your enjoyment.

After the talent show, we watched a nice video of the true meaning of Christmas and although the dialogue was in Korean, I got the message.  It was a good reminder to celebrate the miraculous story of Christ's birth and I was very thankful for the sweet message it brought.  While the video was going, one of the men in the ward told Trevor that he was going to be Santa for the party (the real Santa had of course already come and brought presents to all good boys and girls who believe) so he sneaked away to change.  Turns out they only had a red coat, red pants which were too short and a hat so we had a very young, skinny, sexy Santa with only a small goatee.  The kids didn't seem to mind though since he called each one by name to give them a present and take a picture with them.  They even handed out some presents to the adults.  I did not get to sit on Santa's lap :( but I snuck a picture just in time before he had to get out of his Santa outfit before dinner.

Last but not least, we had a lovely dinner.  It wasn't a ham or turkey or anything like that but a bunch of Korean dishes.  Everything was very tasty (except maybe the acorn jelly...ya don't ask) and it was so refreshing since I hadn't eaten anything since 10am and it was now around 7:30 or so.  Everyone did so much to put on such a fun party and worked so hard.  It was really nice to take part in the festivities and watch the performances and eat good food.

We hope you all had a great Christmas and pray for your safety and well-being in the new year.  If you have any fun stories about your Christmas day, feel free to share in the comments!  We love you all!