SSDPP Christmas Party

　　 The fact that Christmas is not celebrated in China is hard to live with for many foreign students here. This is why the SSDPP Graduate Student Union aspired to bring the Christmas atmosphere into our faculty home and let all the (both foreign and Chinese) students experience a real family Christmas gathering. Overall, the party was a huge success, with the faculty hallway dressed up with Christmas decorations and music and many students sharing the holiday joy. 
  
The evening started out with a dinner for which almost everybody brought delicious festival dishes from their own countries, including African fried rice and chicken, Indonesian GadoGado, Mongolian fried noodles, Chinese dumplings, German pumpkin soup, Dutch/German/Indonesian potato and vegetable pancakes, Laos chicken, Pakistani/Bangladeshi chicken rice and more. There was plenty of food for everyone and Christmas cookies and malt wine to top it off. 
  
After dinner the school president provided us with some of her own advice to improve our experiences at SSDPP and the message that we can contact her for everything we need. Then finally everyone gathered around the Christmas tree for the most exciting part of the evening: receiving their Christmas presents! Mr and Mrs Santa Claus themselves were presiding, though unfortunately Santa did not manage to keep his pants on properly... Each person having brought a simple present, people took turns to choose something to bring back home. When everybody was satisfied with their present the only thing left to do was sing some Christmas songs around the Christmas tree, which is exactly what we did. We made a small world tour, singing carols from the US, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands and China. This concluded a lovely Christmas celebration at our beloved school.