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Merry Christmas to everybody!  Just wanted to say that even though this was our third Xinjiang Christmas away from family, we were still able to manage to have a good time celebrating with friends.  It’s been a busy week trying to prepare for all of the parties and school functions that take place during Christmas so we are looking forward to the upcoming New Year holiday next week wherein we will be getting half of Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday off from work.

I played my final game of the winter basketball tournament I’ve been talking about on Christmas Eve.  It was an exciting game that came down to the final few minutes and my team was able to pull away with a win to take first place trophy for the tournament (see picture below).  I’ve learned quite a lot about how the game of basketball is both played and viewed here in China, and as much as I wanted to share that information publicly I’ve found that most of that knowledge goes beyond the interest of this blog or many of you as readers.  I’ll spare you the talk about philosophies of defense and just tell you that China’s youth are becoming quite the basketball players.