There is a reason why Thanksgiving is a day, but Christmas is a season.

Turkeys turkeys turkeys. I see most of my kids only once every two weeks, so I've been talking about Thanksgiving since last Tuesday. And let me tell you... I'm a bit Turkey-ed out. I've been starting my classes with a game of hangman, where the word is "Thanskgiving" and for a while, it surprised me that: a) it takes them forever to guess the word, and b) my kids respond "¿Qué es eso?" (or if I'm lucky, they say "What is this?"). I thought, "I've done a Thanksgiving lesson 15 times and you really had no clue this was coming?? Did you not talk to anyone?? However, upon further reflection I discovered the reasons for these absurdities. First of all, the letters G and V are hard for them to pronounce so they volunteer just about every other letter in the alphabet before saying these. And secondly, in contrast to my middle/high school experience, the students here stay in the same room while the the teachers move around. So they're in class with the same people all day every day, and there's none of the "Hey, what are we doing is English today?" discussions between classes. So I guess that explains why they were all so blind-sided. Anyway, there is usually one person that knows it's the day where we eat pavo. And to be completely honest... that's basically the jist of it. And I'm teaching 20 classes about it. OK, enough about Thanksgiving... on to bigger and better holidays!

So, as many of you know, I'm coming home for Christmas!! I'm going to officially have the longest birthday of my life. It will last about 33 hours because I'll be crossing time-zones that day. I'm not sure if that sucks or if it's awesome, but I'm so very excited to see my family and friends for the holidays. I just couldn't imagine spending it away from them. I can't wait to drink hot cocoa, watch holiday movies, eat/make Christmas bread, and see Portland lit up for the holiday season! Every once in a while, I get a rush of that holiday spirit. They have started hanging up lights around Bilbao for the holidays, and one of the teachers brought polvorones for everyone, which are traditional holiday treats that sort-of crumble when you bite into them. I tried the almond, chocolate, and lemon ones and they were all pretty good. Another holiday treat is Turrón, which seems kind-of fudge-like to me... It comes in all sorts of flavors, and sometimes nuts or wafers. I'm not explaining it right, but it's delicious.

Anyway, I'm trying to decide what I'm going to do for my lesson plans in December... I've had lots of random ideas like designing/describing an ugly Christmas sweater, doing a white elephant gift exchange, watching "The Grinch" or that old-school Rudolph movie... There are endless possibilities- and I'm open to suggestions.

Also... this is a shameless plug: I'll be done with this program in June (aka unemployed), so if you hear of any jobs that might be opening up (or know someone who I could talk to), please let me know! I'm leaning towards education of some sort, but it will be a year or so until I can start grad school. Clearly I will have experience speaking Spanish and teaching English as a second/foreign language but I'm also interested in math and sports, and I took lots of business classes in college. If you don't have my email, it's allysoncscott@gmail.com. OK, done. Just wanted to throw that out there.

Have a Happy Turkeyday!