Following our trip to Hong Kong we threw ourselves in to Christmas preparations and, in Sam's case, Christmas shopping!
William and Oliver helped me to make the Chirstmas puddings and mince pies and to wrap pressies and get them under the tree.
In China, although Christmas is not a widely celebrated festival in the religious sense, the Chinese do celebrate by putting up decorations and giving some presents to those who do celebrate. Shanghai always makes an effort to put up lots of colourful lights which then remain up for Chinese New Year.
When we were in the UK we used to like to see the Christmas lights wherever we were and we have tried to keep the tradition going here by heading up to the river and looking at some of the lights. In anticipation of lots of non-Chinese food over the festive period we headed to Din Tai Fung, our favourite dumpling restaurant, for supper, followed by a look at the lights to put us in the Christmas spirit.
Our Christmas celebrations traditionally start on Christmas Eve and this year was the same with a slight departure from the norm. Instead of cooking the traditional ham ourselves we ordered the mother of all takeaways from the Shangri-La Hotel.
After a few Christmas Eve presents and prepping for Father Christmas, Sam and I headed to our local for a cheese board and wine, a nice day of non-cooking!
On Christmas Day it was with slightly sore heads that we awoke to the shouts of 'he's been'. We quickly rallied ourselves and Oliver and William were delighted to discover what Father Christmas had brought them.
The rest of the morning was very relaxed (we both even had to pop back to bed for power naps!) as we prepared lunch. Luckily the pollution was a reasonable level so we were able to have a post-lunch walk without our masks. The afternoon passed by with Skype and present opening and even more to eat and unsurprisingly we were all in bed at a pretty reasonable hour.
One of the fears of spending Christmas here is that it won't quite feel like the real thing. Fortunately we are able to get pretty much everything we need food and decoration wise, the weather is cold and friends and family are brilliant at organising gifts and Christmas survival kits. Also there tend to be a core of people who stay here over the holidays and we all try to be each other's families at various points. We spent Boxing Day with William and Oliver's friend Freddie and his family, a day or so later the Harland's joined us to help eat up some of our leftovers and then we spent a day with the Mistry's celebrating Indian style. These days are fab and so important as whilst we are so far from family, friends become family.
On New Year's Eve we volunteered ourselves to host a party. There were about twelve of us left in Shanghai and it was fun celebrating together. William and Oliver had their first non-family sleepover at the Harland's and enjoyed some celebrating themselves!
New Year's Day was gloriously sunny and we enjoyed lunch outside at the pub.
For the remainder of the holiday we have chilled out, been swimming, played in parks and visited soft plays. When Sam went back to work we even went to meet him for lunch as we were missing him!
