Putting Up The Tree

We will be spending Christmas this year in Beijing and I certainly hope that it would be a white Christmas. The temperature has already plunged below zero but snow is slow this year. However, Christmas is still a week away and there is hope yet.

I packed my 7 foot Christmas tree from Malaysia when we shifted over to Beijing last year and we opened up the box to put up the tree last year, we  found that the stand for the tree was damaged in the shifting. Hence, we have not tree in Beijing last year.

The new Christmas tree that we put up this year in Beijing ..

This year, since we are staying put in Beijing for Christmas and no Christmas is complete without a tree, we went out to buy a new one. We were told that they were much cheaper here but we have no idea how cheap they really were until we got ours. We bought a new 5 footer with fiber optic lights, just like the one we had, for only RMB150 (RM75)!!! I remembered that we bought ours back in Malaysia for RM400 (RMB800) at a special discount and we had to drive all the way to Petaling Street to get it!

This would be the first year that Chenya could help in decorating the tree and she had fun, both helping and fighting with her brother while helping of course. Daddy was busy in putting up the ornaments while mommy was busy with the camera (or busy figuring out how to use the camera).

We also bought a Christmas wreath to hang on our door for the very first time. I have always wanted to buy one and hang on our doors for so many years but they were so so expensive back in Malaysia that I could not bear to pay the price to buy one. After much bargaining, of which my better half is pretty good at, we managed to get one that we like for a steal. Only RMB70 (RM35)! 

In fact, when Ryan had a Christmas party in school last week and we were asked to contribute some food, we contributed a similar tree instead of food, so that the children could put up the tree and hang up the ornaments themselves. And the tree can be used for a few years to come and we told the teachers that it would be a cool idea to get the kids to write their names and year and hang it up on the tree. Hence, over the years, they can actually see ornaments belonging to different kids who have been to that class previously.

More of that and pictures in the next post.