Sugar, Glitter, Santa, and Bringing People to Tears

The week leading up to Christmas break is always the busiest week for a teacher. And the longest. And the best as well as the worst. It's the worst because it is virtually impossible to make children behave when they are hopped up on sugar, glitter, santa, and the thought of two weeks without school. But also the best because of special Christmas crafts, happy, smiling children, Christmas parties, and the inevitable haul of Christmas presents elementary teachers score on the last day of school.

I had a very good week with my class. I do like them a lot this year and am very happy with my new teaching job in Williams Lake. I'm thankful for the break I am on now and spent my first day off reading, working out, reading some more, starting a mountain of wedding thank-you cards, reading a bit more, going out on a fantabulous date with my husband and totally killing him at bowling. It's quite rare that I beat him at anything because he is good at e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g so I was pretty stoked to be better (cough, cough, *much* better), than him at one thing. 

This week was also our annual Christmas Concert and my class was awesome. I knew they would be, but they really, really, really blew the audience out of the water. I choreographed a "hand-mime". Something I had never seen before until randomly lost on YouTube one day. It was so cool and the song that we used is so powerful and true that it brought many audience members to tears both that night and the following day when we performed it in chapel. The song talks about the various parts of Christmas; the manger, the shepherds, the wise men etc and then reminds us through the chorus that that is not really what Christmas is all about. It's about:

It's about the cross,
It's about our sin,
It's about how Jesus came to be born once
So that we could be born again
It's about the stone,
That was rolled away
So that you and I can have real life today.
It's about the cross.

Here's the actual video of my students from our performance on Tuesday night.

Merry Christmas everyone!