Christmas in Thailand

Thai people don't really celebrate Christmas, but they do use Christmas decorations (trees, garland, Santa Clause, reindeer, lights and snowmen) to celebrate the New Year. They also like to give each other gifts so Christmastime in Thailand feels a lot like home...minus the cold weather.

As you can see, we even have a tree! Granted it's not a big tree...but it works for now. Santa even stopped by and brought us a few gifts!

The Mastache Family (Mark and Helen, expat friends from Chris' company) invited us to join them for Christmas Day in Bangkok. On Christmas Eve we traveled down and decided to treat ourselves to a fancy hotel (to celebrate, and because many hotels are cutting prices to get tourists interested in coming back to Thailand after the airport closures). We stayed at Dream, which is an ultra-modern 5-star hotel which we had seen on a travel show before. It was really cool but we felt a little out of place at times. :) They also have a club and many bands and groups like the Black Eyed Peas have played there. For dinner we went to their restaurant, Flava, and had a 4 course Christmas dinner, complete with turkey!

On Christmas Day we celebrated by going to the dentist. Yes, really. We needed to have our checkups and since we were in Bangkok anyway we figured we should just get it done. After that we went to the Mastache house for Christmas dinner and home made egg nog! There were about 9 of us at the party and we drank a lot of wine and played some games. Then we took dessert to the hospital where Mark was recovering from surgery. We also snuck him some Champagne! :) His hospital room was nicer than most of the hotels we've stayed in (and cheaper too)!