I know this is little late but I thought you’d enjoy seeing our Christmas cookies! We use my Grandma Mann’s recipe (cream cheese in the batter)!

Our little bitty oven! Luckily the cookie cutters in Korea are made by a company with a similar school of thought! All so small!

Okay, the snowman looks like it is carrying a bazooka

Piles and piles! We had SO many cookies. We gave away 7 bags of 8 cookies to neighbours (that was an interesting experience) and still had half the pile left!

Our traditional rolling pin! Two times makes a tradition!

Chad was a HUGE help! He is researching frosting recipes. . . hahaha.

I got bored while I was waiting for the cookies to bake. . .

The end. I hope you got some yummy Christmas cookies too!

Often times our school days change unexpectedly. Classes are canceled, teachers forget we have camps, we are told unexpectedly to pack up because we’re going home early. It’s all part of the Korean system. So today we were not surprised at all when during our morning tea time Teacher Chang tells us there will be a puppet show for grades 1-4 at 11am. Not a big deal really, and it meant we didn’t have to teach an hour of our 1st grade camp (which is always a thrill!). Those little guys are cute but they’re a big pain in the butt… (just imagine 14- 8 year old boys and 2 girls…. now imagine you don’t speak their language….. now imagine trying to explain the seasons to them.) In other words we’re more than happy to hand over the little hoodlums to a friendly troupe of puppeteers.
Their play – I’m assuming from the yelling father characters – had something to do with domestic abuse. This could be way off, but last week we were visited by two people from a domestic abuse center – so I can only imagine it was to set up today’s performance. A series of vignettes about 4 childrens’ home life… eye opening really – well it might have been, if I could have understood any of it.

In the afternoon only a handful of kids showed up for our 5-6 grade phonics class (a common occurrence). So we decided to make them put together the Christmas tree we had the school buy Aren’t we clever! They were only allowed to speak in English, NO KOREAN! Luckily the tree turned out pretty well..
But Joon Kyu let his Korean heritage shine through and was dealt the classic punishment!

Next I’ll write about the joys of Korean Meetings. And sometime soon we’ll answer the question: What does a dog say? – The answer may surprise you!