Baan Unrak! Baan Unrak! Back again!

It's hard to write without hyperbole and exclamations and calling everything the best ever, but this (like last year) really was my Best Christmas Ever. Had it been October rather than December, I would be describing the Best Week Before Halloween Ever, but it carries a weight of romanticism to even say the word Christmas. (There's no other holiday for which WHAM! would be receiving royalties with such a pathetic song. John Mayer took a weak stab at nurturing sympathies for lesser holidays with "Just 'Til St Patrick's Day," but it didn't work. Let WHAM! have their monopoly, buddy. You stick with pleasant asthmatic whining.)

Christmas Eve was our first full day at the home, so we were all doing different things. I was shown a bolt of cloth and asked to get the kids to sew a stocking for every child in the home. There are 112 kids. I had 6 needles, 3 scissors, a roomful of bouncy kids, and an afternoon. So, Brad and Alicia and I set up assembly lines, finding jobs for the different ability levels of the kids, and they got about 50 or 60 done by hand.
Need stockings? Elf knickers? Get 'em at Santa's Little Sweatshop.

Chelsea prepared an elaborate musical for everyone to perform at the pageant, and it was adorable. Sarah and Annabelle (the two little children) claim that you can't have Christmas without:
1) Snow
2) Reindeer
3) Presents
Colin, the patient dad, informed them SURE YOU CAN! You can have Christmas without any of these things aslongasyoulovethebabyjesus. (In 'Merica, Jesus loves ALL the little children... 'cept the bad ones. And possibly the homosekshuls. But snow and reindeer are unconditionals. Everyone loves the reindeer.) And then everyone broke into multi-lingual song. It was a perfect skit, and we have some great singers in our group. We really had no clue about whether this was a Japan-style Christmas-minus-Christianity farce, or whether we were being asked to promote it as it was regardless of whether our group wants to promote Christianity. The orphanage isn't religious, the kids aren't Christian, but one of the nuns had many holiday requests relating to The Baby Jesus. Though Christmas has become something so different through culture to pop culture and back again, it IS about.. you know... Christ. We weren't sure where to tread, holding a pile of gifts and clothing for The Baby Jesus while chanting an "All is Love" meditation in Hindi. Politically correct can be culturally incorrect, but we went the PC route and had a shadow puppet show with magical animals, and focused on Rudolph instead of Jesus. Not a huge worry anyway, since the kids have limited English, and were more interested in the fire. And the horse.

Most of the kids did a Burmese or Thai or Karen song/dance of some kind. The house mothers did an awesome Thai pop-song rendition.

That's not the bonfire. That's part of the bonfire that the adorable little pyro below dragged out with a stick before getting distracted and trotting away again.

And this is the horse. The story related to Mary and Joseph, and an Eastern European folktale about animals talking on Christmas day, and imagining something so strongly that it happens. I couldn't hear very well. But at some point, this horse rocked up to the pageant to watch and all the kids harassed it the rest of the night. I can't recall where horses fit into the picture, or talking ones at that. Been away from Sunday School too many years.