Our first Christmas in Bangkok

It’s cold. I’m actually wearing a shawl most mornings because at 6am it feels a bit chilly. The temperature gets as low as 20 degrees. No, that’s not below 0.  And yes, I never thought I’d call 20 degrees cold, but now I do. Even the street dogs are wearing clothes! It’s our first Christmas in Bangkok, and it’s nice, it feels a bit more Christmassy than it did a couple of weeks ago. We were taking some pictures to send instead of Christmas cards and couldn’t understand why it was so ridiculously hot… then we saw a thermometer showing 40 degrees. Hence, the only time you can feel the Christmas mood is travelling on the skytrain after dusk – when you’re inside a train with aircon set to probably 16 and you see all the Christmas lights through the window.

It’s interesting that even though everything is decorated for Christmas and there are Christmas trees all over the place, we couldn’t find any Christmas cards to buy.

For the past 3 days at school all I’ve been doing with the girls was listening to Christmas songs while they were making Christmas cards. I couldn’t believe how creative they were – those were the most beautiful cards I’ve seen kids make! Even the non-participant naughty girls got involved – I was amazed:)

And what a celebration we had at school today! We were singing Christmas songs during the morning ceremony, the little ones were dressed up as angels, reindeers.. And when multiple Santas were throwing sweets into the crowd, the girls looked like a colourful sea with waives rising up wherever candy appeared! And there was non-stop partying in every classroom afterwards…

But it still doesn’t feel like Christmas Eve. It almost feels as if Christmas has come and gone without a trace.

Maybe it’s because we’re not having the traditional Christmas Eve dinner and we’ll be eating pasta, olives and cheese with wine instead. Reason being these things are so expensive here that we decided that will be our Christmas present for ourselves. We’ve even received cheese by post as a gift!:)

Or maybe it doesn’t feel like Christmas because Vidmantas has to work tomorrow, so we won’t have the usual long lazy Christmas morning with coffee and tons of chocolate and clementines, presents and wrapping paper all over the place…

But then… Vidmantas came home and I realised that’s what’s been missing to feel like Christmas!