another epic christmas: part 4.

We had just one more epic celebration before calling it for this year. Our Burmese church, Light of Love, hosts a huge Christmas event each year. It was delayed a bit this year, and actually ended up on New Year’s Eve.

We represented our neighborhood well: 46 friends came with us! We squeezed into three car loads, leaving some of us there quite early. Thankfully, we still have a selfie stick to utilize.

Taking 46 people also involved a checklist on our phones of who came with us to ensure everyone made it back!

Our church is located just across the street from a huge factory, and it meets on Sunday evenings, the one time each week when the factories are closed. It serves communities just like ours, which is really fun to see and be a part of.

The Christmas party brings hundreds of people each year, where they welcome everybody in, sing songs, share the gospel, and then have a huge raffle. The raffle is a big hit, giving away everything from plastic bins and baskets to a rice cooker and bicycle.

Because it’s a very poor community, “raffle” means something totally different. It’s not one or two items–it’s nearer to one hundred. And it’s not a stack of plastic bowls, it’s raffling off each and every plastic bowl. Because of the excitement, sometimes they won’t just call a number, but call it like this:

The first number is…it’s not 2! It’s not 6! It’s 4! And the third number is…5! And the middle number is…What do you think the middle number is? What do you want the middle number to be? It’s 3! 4-3-5! 4-3-5! 435! 

Then you have to wait for 435 to make his way through a crowd of hundreds of people to claim his plastic bowl. So while our neighbors were just jumping in their seats to win, Stephen and I were texting back and forth about how this was going to take absolutely forever.

It did.

We did get called on stage to help in calling raffle numbers! Believe me, I did not dilly-dally around. We called those numbers directly. 257 is 257, because it’s simpler in Burmese and because I kind of wanted to go home.

In the end, we managed to take home a small collection of plastic items in the community, including a plastic tray for Stephen! He was cheered the whole way down to the front. I also managed to call the rice cooker on my own ticket 😬  Whoops! Thankfully a neighbor was holding it and came to claim it!

Really, it was fun to see a very Burmese version of Christmas–exactly what the neighbors know and can relate to. And for us, we both left with the same thought: perhaps we’re not too far from normal. Sometimes it feels like our neighborhood is ridiculous–with the stabbings and domestic disputes; when our Christmas meal involves a drunken brawl? You start to wonder where you’ve gone wrong. You start to wonder if you’re just horrible at this.

But at this church Christmas, they had much the same. People got grabby for things. They crowded their way to the front. The pastor’s wife had to pause and ask everyone to calm down, to sit down, to listen and enjoy it without getting carried away. There was a huge crowd of drunken guests in the back, and it even involved a riot that broke into the nearby sewing factory, requiring a visit from the police and military.

So, y’know–we left feeling like we might not be so crazy. And on that note, we called it a wrap for our Epic Christmas 2016 😀