Mulcahy's Christmas

I do tend to forget to bring my camera with me to just about everywhere I go. Even when I know in advance its going to be somewhere fairly interesting. Ken was out of commission today, you can check his blog for all the details. I ended up meeting up with Nick and Patrick and a bunch of Patrick’s friends at an orphanage to play games with the kids and hand out presents. I got in on this idea a little late in the game, and really hadn’t helped do all of the hard work like organizing and preparation, I just donated some money to the gift drive the other day and that was about it. Now I know that handing out gifts to Korean orphans sounds very altruistic of me so I just want you to know that other people did all the really hard work.

That being said I was really glad I went, and I was able to lend a hand in the festivities. When we got there we brought lunch for the kids, some traditional Korean food like gimbap (kinda like California rolls) and bulkogi (like rigatoni, but not really at all) and a whole bunch of pizza. Pizza places are common here but it is considered a bit more of a treat than back home, and they put things like corn and potato wedges on them. Then we went out into the yard and hid a whole bunch of candies for the kids. Now ‘hid’ might be too strong a word, we were basically given the choice of either making it really obvious or near impossible (basically burying them). We opted for the former.
Now as far as I know we don’t really have orphanages in Canada, so I was a little curious to see what the orphans were going to be like. Nick was telling me that here a lot of these kids are just left in the Subway and eventually the authorities pick them up and bring them to orphanages. When they came they looked pretty much the same as the kids at the hagwon, even the way they dressed. This is slightly surprising, since those kids are the rich kids (or at least well off enough for their parents to send them to private school) and these ones are not.

They enjoyed their food but you could tell they were fairly shy around the foreigners at first. There was something interesting I noticed about the way they ate too, they actually had leftovers. Now this strikes me as odd because the kids I teach never fail to finish any food that is put down in front of them, in blind defiance of the cries of their sated appestat. These kids ate until they weren’t hungry anymore and then stopped. Weird.

I helped clean up while the kids hunted for candy, but got outside in time to help some kids get some hard to reach candies. It seems that someone had used a penknife to thread some candies into the branches of a tree that they couldn’t reach. That someone was of course me.

I saw one of the other foreigners with a handful of candy a bunch of the kids had given him. I just shook my head at him and admonished :”Geez man, stealing candy from orphans on Chirstmas day. You’re a real class act.” He laughed and just gave the only response you can. He shrugged and said: “Yeah well..”

Then we had our first game which was a dancing one. The premise being simply you dance when the music is playing and stop when it stops. We were pumping a NKOTB ‘Funky Christmas’ album, but at first not many of the kids actually wanted to dance. Understandable. When I was eight years old and my teachers ran ill concieved holiday dance parties in my elementary class I remember not wanting to look like a fool either. Nick and I broke the ice a bit by getting up in front of everyone and dancing in a way that was wilder and more embarrassing than anything they could think of so they just starting getting into it. I pulled out every fancy move that I could remember from four years of dance, movement and clown class from university and they seemed to really enjoy it. And yes I split my jeans but no one noticed.
We followed that up with a few other group games outside before heading inside for some Christmas carols. We sang a few for the kids, I even soloed a bit with Frosty the snowman when everyone else forgot the words. Either that or I was off tempo and the loudest. Who cares, I got my closeup.

Then some of the girls showed us some choreographed dance moves they had put together to some korean Christmas songs. Oh sure they weren’t actually all that good, but we all loved it anyway. I think I’m starting to understand how parents can watch kids do horrible plays and recitals and still like it. Its cheesy but the kids were just so adorable.

Then the big moment came when Santa showed up. Santa was in fact Patrick who had been waiting down the street for the last few hours so as not to ruin the surprise. Which kinda sucks for him since he missed the rest of the day but then it was a good surprise for the kids who had a new foreigner to look at. Santa was a little tall and thin to fit the regular image and his beard wasn’t white but honestly I don’t think the kids minded one bit.

They had been given ‘Dear Santa’ notes before so the gifts given out to the orphans (there were maybe 30 of them) were somewhat personalized. Renee, one of the girls who was the main organizers confided that they were worried since they sometimes had to guess and they weren’t always sure from the letters whether the kid was a boy or a girl. But for the most part there weren’t any big problems.

It was the first kid to go up, a pretty little girl, that had me all full of Christmas cheer. She got a teddy bear and you could see that from the moment she opened it she suddenly had a new favorite thing in the world.

The next kid was a boy who was given a knitting kit. I turned to Renee to see if we had to rush in with a replacement gift (they had a few in the back just in case) but she just shrugged and assured me he asked for it.

Overall the kids looked thrilled with their toys, and it was nice to see the older kids jut take the younger kids into their laps and explain their new gifts to them. Such a family relationship there.

Anyway the time at the orphanage I just consider a cool gift that I got, since it was the other people there that did all the really hard work. Now don’t tell me that dancing in front of kids is hard work, cause its not. Buying and wrapping gifts and making food and planning events is tough. I’m not saying I didn’t contribute, I’m just very lucky to have had a job that day that was the least amount of effort with the highest returns.
And just before I was leaving I went behind the mess hall to the chicken coop and chased around some chickens for a bit. Its not something Christmassy but its something I’ve long wanted to do and I figure in a Korean orphanage was a good place.

After that Nick, Patrick and I headed down to the Seaman’s Club for Christmas dinner. It’s a club run for merchant marines that specializes in western fare. They had a buffet set up with all sorts of traditional Christmas food. Turkey, ham, beef, potatoes, corn, pie- basically just like back home. So I got to end the day with a nice comfort food meal with some good friends. It would have been better if Ken had been able to come along for the day- but hopefully I’ll be able to show him a good time on new years.

Anyway this was a really cool Christmas for me, probably in some ways the most Christmassy Christmas I’ve ever spent.

I hope that all my friends and family and even the people I don’t-much-like-but-don’t-totally-hate are having great Christmasi too. The rest of you? Well I hope you get diarrhea.