a little coffee

For our last week of classes, Chris and I thought it’d be fun to teach our students Christmas songs.  He was hard at work learning hits such as Jingles Bells, Deck the Halls, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Silent Night, I Saw Three Ships, and 12 Days of Christmas.

We combined the classes that we could and turned the last hour into a giant sing-along.  And they all went crazy for the guitar- and me in my red Santa hat that said Merry Christmas.  Most of them knew the chorus to Jingle Bells and it was fantastic getting them to sing the Fa la la la las in Deck the Halls.  12 Days of Christmas was the highlight- and a stroke of genius on Chris’s part.  We assigned groups to sing a certain part of the song (3 French hens, 9 ladies dancing, etc) but by the time we got to 10 lords a-leaping, everyone had figured out the melody- and changed and slowed it to accommodate their pronunciation.  My favorite part was getting the class of 60 students to belt out 5 GOLDEN RINGS!!!  Oh yeah.  Everyone in the building heard us and they were jealous!

For an encore, Chris whipped out his rendition of Britney Spears’s (we think she’s called Blondie in China) hit Baby, One More Time.  Many of the students already knew the song and sang along with the chorus.  And yes, even I sang.  (Family, this is true).  Call it a Christmas miracle but by the fourth class, I was belting out “My loneliness is killing, I must confess I still believe (still believe!)” right along with Chris who shows his guitar no mercy when it comes to pop music.