Sunday 23 December 2007

Happy Holidays

I have not escaped Christmas music by being here. It is marginally less annoying than in the states because on occasion I am blessed by the carol being in Korean, which does not get stuck in my head and can be far more easily ignored because unless it says "yes", "no", "what did you do last weekend?", or "foreigner" I won't recognize the words. This may be an example of blissful ignorance.

Whilst poking around in a nearby store I got to listen to the song about Santa the Stalker (aka Santa Claus is Coming to Town). The highlight of this was that despite being a long-established song, with lyrics that have gone unchanged for dozens of shopping seasons, the song as sung by Koreans contained the kinds of grammatical errors I correct for a living. Example, when singing about Santa: He know [sic] when you are sleeping, he know [sic] when you're awake. There was another song where the lyric starts out with first person plural (we) and ends in first person singular.

Sometime this week my kids will sing Jingle Bell Rock and perform a very short play written by my coworker (A Gift for a Snowman*). It should be interesting. Possibly adorable. The sum total of my contribution to this was having the kids run through their lines at the end of my classes and naming the snow fox (which, in the spirit of simplicity and rather dumb naming schemes for young'uns is "Snowball"**).

*Spoiler: sunglasses.
**Although, thanks to Clerks, this does bring up secondary, more mature mental images.

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