The things I do for love, or because its my job and I have too

In the world of Elementary school teaching and of teaching a foreign languages especially, doing things that seem foolish and embarrassing to a normal person are simply a matter of course. I daily jump around, sing and dance to really poorly written children’s music and wear funny holiday hats. I have no problem with this, what it takes for me to get embarrassed is much greater than what it was, but it can still happen. Like today.
The other day my co-teacher came to me and told me that we would be taking a group of students to have a class at the local Daoist temple dedicated to the Earth God. It sounded great. Then she said “and you will be Santa Claus.” Yes that’s right this morning I got dressed up as Santa Claus and took a group of kids to a Daoist temple. Now why might we do that? It leads me to my next question “Will anyone else be there?” “Only the TV cameras and reporters.” See the temple gives us money for students and the school wanted to show some gratitude. Apparently the best way to do that is to have some sort of event that the media can be invited to, and given that the Season is Christmas, Santa Claus was our selling point.
We wrote up our lesson plan in which we would compare Santa to the Earth God. I tried to say that I thought it wasn’t the best comparison given that mostly only children believe in Santa while many real grownups believe faithfully in the Earth God. Roxanna didn’t think it was a problem and she is the Taiwanese person to I just went with the flow. I looked up the relationship between Santa and St. Nick so that I might find some ground on which to justify the comparison. I learned some interesting things, but none of it came out in the lesson. Did you know that Santa as we know him today is little more than 100 years old?
When we got to the temple, it seemed pretty comfortable and I even diluded myself into thinking that maybe the news people might not show. Ha Ha, foolish me. While going over Earth God and Santa vocabulary the swarm decended. There must have been 3 or 4 reporters with cameras and at least 3 TV cameras. The lesson came apart at the seams and we all started simply heeding the reporters directives. “Move over there,” “Children stand here” etc. Then they had my principle put on an Earthgod costume that must have weighed 30 pounds. I see this as retribution since I think it was his idea that I wear the Santa costume. I said Merry Christmas to the Earth God a lot and then got separately interviewed and was stuck with questions like “What do you think of Taiwan?” and “What are the differences between Santa and the earth god?” Instead of giving insightful answers like “well for one, Santa is not a god” I said things like “Taiwan is very special” and “There are many differences, but they are both important traditions.”
The locusts left just as quickly as they had appeared and I was given a little relief. I pulled down my beard and ate some tang yuan (sweet soup). Then I was freed from the torture and appeared the next day in several newspapers. I’ll try to upload the article soon.