Planning Christmas and Thanksgiving

Hurray for the holidays! I love planning to celebrate, well, anything really, so I get excited for all the plans this time of year. These coming holidays are intrinsically family-centered and family is hugely important to me. I was raised with a strong heritage of family togetherness, and I can’t imagine not having any family around to share holidays or birthdays. Being single on the mission field is hard during the holidays. While my family can’t replace theirs, we hope we can be an extended family to those on the field who need one, especially during critical times such as holidays and other celebrations.

We are hosting a Thanksgiving meal for the single missionaries we know and one Ch_nese mom and son, and so far we have 8 adults coming and 4 kids including ours. The extra child is Alex’s age and was born in the States but whose parents are of Ch_nese nationality. As a third-culture kid, growing up in Thailand with Ch_nese parents but only interested in American culture because of his dad’s influence, we hope coming to our celebration will help him and his mom with his third-culture struggles. Beyond that, we also have a single missionary from New Zealand celebrating with us who’s excited to join us just for fun. Multi-national US thanksgiving celebration is now a thing at our house.

​As mentioned in our last post, we have a connection to the Ch_nese community here in Chiang Mai and we hope to further that relationship during the Christmas season. Our friend from Thanksgiving knows a group of single moms living in Chiang Mai who each have one child, and they’ll all be invited to a Christmas celebration here through her. I only know one of their stories, but in Ch_nese culture it is most common for the one child in the family to be raised by the grandparents who live in a city with the best school system they can afford and the child can get into, while the parents live in other cities where they can get the best paying job, often also apart from each other. So, I’m assuming that these moms (like the mom I know) are here raising their kids in Thailand for the international education while their husbands are working elsewhere. 

I was planning to have one huge Christmas Eve Eve celebration including the single missionaries, Ch_nese families, and hopefully a Thai friend who is a single mom and her family is too far away for her to visit. However, as I started to type this out right now and think about those logistics, I’m not sure that’s going to be possible space-wise. Hmmm. Ok, so clearly this needs thought through a little further. Stay tuned for November’s post to see what the plans are then…! I was hoping to have everyone together since some of the missionaries have previously worked in a country where they’ll relate to the moms coming, so I thought they’d be a mutual blessing to each other. I’ll figure it out…

Anyway, this brings us to explaining how you can help if you’re interested. We would love to make this an extra special time with gift bags for the kids, Western food for the missionaries and even small gifts if possible. If your family, church, Sunday school, small group or whatever would be interested in helping us with any of these costs, we’ve set up a convenient/quick way to do so on our site. Go to our “Support Us” page to access our two categories, “Missionary Christmas Celebration” or “Other Holidays”. Also, under the “More” tab in the menu bar, you can access each category directly there. There are multiple options to help with under both categories and you can read a description about each option if you click on them to go to their specific page. The descriptions will give you a few more details about each option you can support. 

Here’s the details about these options. While it’s a quick and easy way to give us a financial gift, you won’t get a tax-deductible receipt by giving through our site. If you need one for your personal or group records, please donate through our organization CMC (Christian Missionary Clearinghouse). They process our donations and will send you a tax-deductible receipt at the end of the year for all of your donations to our ministry. You can also set up monthly or reoccurring donations and mail checks through them. Scroll to the bottom of our “Support Us” page for this option. Either way you give, the money will be used towards these events. 

Thank you for reading through the details to the end! Hopefully they were understandable but concise. If you want more information or clarification email us, or if you’d rather talk to someone in person in the States, check our “Contact Us” page for the number (bottom left). 

Happy Holidays’ planning!
– Ruth, for the Baker family.