Saturday evening was BFA's annual Christmas banquet. It's mostly a high school event, and all the students get all dressed up for dinner and a show. Students sing duets, play musical instruments, and do stand-up comedy routines for entertainment, and a few teachers serve as MCs for the night. This year's theme was Candyland, so there was lots of candy sprinkled on the tables and fun, festive decorations all over the place.
A handful of our eighth graders are chosen to be banquet servers, which requires them to don a Santa hat and feed everyone who comes to banquet. They did a great job as servers, and next year they will get to sit back and enjoy banquet for themselves! I'm looking forward to attending banquet in a few years, when all of my current students will be high schoolers... it's much more fun to attend these sorts of things when you
know all the students.
The next day, I went to Basel, Switzerland after church with a few friends to visit the Weihnachtmarkt, or Christmas market. Apparently, Basel has the longest Christmas street in the world, so I was pretty excited to see it. Unfortunately we didn't get to see very much because we ran out of time, but the parts we did see were really cool. There was just booth after booth of people selling everything from candles to jewelry to wool socks to Christmas ornaments. There were also a lot of food booths, and many vendors selling gluhwein, a traditional spiced wine typically consumed at Christmas time. I'm not a huge fan of alcohol, but I wanted to try a cultural experience. I took a sip of someone else's drink and almost spit it back out. Yuck. Jill and I happily nursed our hot chocolate and brought home the souvenir mugs in which the drink was sold.
Today, the handbell choir of which I am a part played at the Luise Klaiber Haus, a nursing home right next door to BFA. It's nice to be so close, because many of the students have found ways to minister there, either through music or service opportunities. Unfortunately I don't speak German yet, so when a kind old man starting talking to me, I had to run and get my friend Katrina to translate for me! I felt just a little bit silly. Our bell choir is composed of teachers, staff, and parents from the BFA community, and we have only been practicing for about a month. So yeah, we were a little rough around the edges during our first performance. But that's ok, because we still had fun! Plus, we get a chance to redeem ourselves this Sunday when we play at the Mennonite church in Basel, during their morning service. I haven't played bells since the spring of 2007, so it was really great to be playing challenging pieces and performing again. I wish this could be a year-round group.
Now that the middle of the week has passed, I need to focus on the next few days. Tomorrow I head up to Maug for my weekly dorm sub duties, and on Friday I am speaking in middle school chapel! EEK! I have an idea of what I would like to share, but I'm having a little trouble tying all the loose thoughts into a coherent message. Please pray for me as I share my heart with the middle schoolers on Friday. Pray also for our basketball teams, who will be playing in the first games of the season here at home this weekend, and for me as I am learning how to run the scoreboard and will be the official time keeper for two games! Double EEK!
I forgot to mention that today was another spirit day for middle schoolers, and the theme was Twin Day. Ironically, Mrs. Watson and I accidentally dressed like twins on Monday, two days before we were supposed to! Here are some pictures from Twin Day - click on them to make them bigger.
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