As Christmas approaches, we decided somewhat on a whim to host a holiday party at our apartment last weekend. We knew we were going to lose some potential attendees with the proximity to the holiday (some people traveling early) and the late notice (some people had other holiday parties already scheduled).
I think part of our interest in hosting the party was to try to make it feel a little more like Christmas. The tree is up and trimmed, we downloaded a ton of Christmas music, and Steph did a great job of decorating the apartment, but it still does not quite feel like Christmas. It's cold - which is better than my boss who's an expat in Malaysia where it's 80+ degrees every day! But it still doesn't feel much like Christmas. I guess I should not be surprised, given being in China.
We made the decision not to go home for Christmas. Intel only pays for 1 home leave trip a year, so we decided to use it this coming summer, when Olivia is out of school. We thought briefly about paying to head home ourselves, but the tickets would have been roughly $6K, and our travel budget is already earmarked for the Chinese New Year trip to New Zealand.
So that being said, we decided to manufacture a little Christmas cheer by hosting a holiday gathering. We provided drinks, and asked everyone to bring their favorite holiday dessert. We targeted a late start time, to allow for all the attendees (and us) to take care of kids before coming. We set up the girls at a friends house with their daughter - a regular babysitter of ours - and at 8:00pm we had the lights turned low, and with Christmas music on iTunes we were ready to receive guests.
We had roughly 25 people attend, which was great. Not too many folks, but a great mix of people we had met from our different areas of life in Shanghai. Some friends from work, some friends from my basketball team, and a number of other expats we have met either in our complex or through Olivia's school.
The most popular drink of the night was not a very 'holiday' drink. The popular drink, at least with the women in attendance was a Cosmopolitan. It was popular enough that I ran out of cranberry juice before midnight! Seeing as this was my first ever attempt at this drink, I was happy that I didn't ruin them!
By midnight we were down to a core group of friends from here in our complex. Dwayne and Dana were ready to head home, and our kids were asleep in their bed, so we had to close the party down around 1:00am. Our friend Patrick was jokingly complaining about this being the first time he had been kicked out of a party early... He looked at Steph and said with a straight face 'Lovely party, we won't be coming next year'. I guess we'll learn not to give the McStravick's the boot early!
We gathered up our kids at the Canfield's and brought them home and snuggled them into their beds.
It was a great night... It still doesn't feel like Christmas, but a holiday party made it a little more bearable!
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