Well, it’s me, Peter for a change here.
For Christmas at school this year I decided to give the kids a small taste of the sort of Christmas I used to have back in South Africa.
Much like in South Africa, where we are sweating in 30 degree heat at Christmas time, the weather here also doesn’t get cold enough for a “white” Christmas.
Well, in my family we have some Norwegian heritage from the mother’s side of the family, and on my dad’s side it’s English. So we ended up with a bit of a mixed bag of Christmas traditions during my childhood. It was always Christmas Eve with my mom’s side of the family and my dad’s folks, we had a big dinner, followed by a lot of singing and dancing around the Christmas tree. Christmas day was a big lunch with my dad’s side of the family.
Besides being quite a busy two days we obviously enjoyed the double dose of Christmas gifts too and were quite spoiled.
But the most memorable part was the singing and dancing on New Year’s Eve, which was pretty unique to our family (I don’t know of anyone amongst my friends who did this).
Christmas at Double C
So for Christmas at school this year I dragged the Christmas tree to the middle of the room, turned down the lights, lit up the Christmas tree and treated the kids to a short round of both English and Norwegian songs.
For any astute Norwegian readers, I have no idea how to sing the songs correctly, but what I lack in the word department I try to make up in the actions and enthusiasm department.
I used an old handout that my dad created for a Christmas Eve in 2003… you can get it from here.
Caroling
We started off with the English Christmas Carols.
It was amazing how the kids were so focused and pretty calm when immersed in the whole Christmas environment. None of them knew all the songs, and those who knew a little knew only the very popular songs choruses. But they were all troopers and sang along as best they could.
Jingle Bells
Så går vi rundt om en enerbærbusk, a Norwegian Christmas song (I have the song sheet as my cheat sheet)
We sang some of the others as I though they could manage.
Gifts
On Christmas Eve my grandfather would always dress up as Santa and walk into the house sometime after dinner. It was only after we were in our teens that we clued up to the fact that Grandpa was always missing during gift giving.
All the gifts were under the tree and it was the kids job to get the gifts, take them to Santa, have Santa announce who they were for and then deliver the gift to them.
But I wasn’t Santa here so…
Ava and I prepared some gifts for the kids.
We all sat around the tree, then I asked each of the kids to pick a gift from under the tree and give it to whomever it was for.
They were most astonished when they found out the gifts were not what they thought they would be. At least a few of them have siblings in classes earlier in the week and were expecting the same things.
The kids had a blast and so did I. Will definitely enjoy doing it again next year.