feeling the holiday Spirit

Yesterday Stefan had a ridiculously stressful morning with 8 people sitting in on his lesson and then having to do endure 2 hours of critiques. You may have heard about it directly from either his email or in person - but for everybody who prayed: Many Thanks! It went superbly and congratulations abounded. It was really a great time of encouragement for him. In the afternoon his principal pulled him aside to say that he thought it had gone really well, not that he was surprised, but it's why he made the effort to get him in the school. - nice!

Last Friday in my class my teacher wanted to explain something to the class about Advent, being that Germany goes bonkers for the Christmas season and all. She had forgotten to bring some material to school, but I remembered I had a copy of Roland's new little book "Christmas is More: from swaddling clothes, wonder, and Magi" (von Windeln, Wunder und Weisen sounds a little better auf Deutsch!). It explains what the real meaning of Christmas is and has lots of little things that catch your eye as you flip through it.

There is a section on "Christmas A-Z" and the paragraph on Advent was just what she was looking for. She continued to flip through the little book throughout the class and said how interesting it was. She read a few more things aloud from it to our class. She said she would have to make some copies and we could work through them as a class. I told her I could easily get more copies of the book and would bring them to class - at no cost to the students, it was a great way to get everybody a copy, and they were less than 2 Euro each. I emailed Roland to tell him how great it was that I'd had his book and he wrote back and said I could have a class set for free and made arrangements for me to pick them up! Wonderful! I picked them up yesterday, rode home in the pouring rain (on my bike, way fun) and slipped a bookmark in each one and stuffed them in my backpack. I felt a little like Santa today as I distributed the books! People immediately began looking through them and I'm curious to see how tomorrow's class goes - that's when we're supposed to discuss it!