Last Friday House of Knowledge (HOK) opened their doors to parents and kids to celebrate their ninth annual St. Martin’s Lantern Walk. My husband, daughter (3 years old) and I arrived to the wonderful smell of mulled wine and German sausage roasting on the grill; this gave us a proper European winter feeling.
One of the students made a lantern for our daughter so she could “be in the parade” as my daughter put it. The kids had some outside play on the wonderful playground before we were off for a walk and singing with our lanterns. HOK provided a song book with several St. Martin’s songs but “Twinkle Twinkle” was by far the most popular song in English, German, and Chinese. After we came back from our walk, we sampled the mulled wine, hot chocolate, and homemade cookies.
There were several activities do for the kids including outdoor glow in the dark activities, and indoor arts and crafts. Most importantly there were mothers and teachers face painting, and this is always very popular with our daughter and lots of other kids. The passion and hard work of the face painters was received with lots of joy by our daughter, and she was heartbroken when we had to wash off the beautiful, painted butterfly later.
We sampled the German sausage and some of the warming goulash then picked up our traditional St.Martin’s bread man which didn’t make it home but was devoured on the bus. We will definitely make this part of our family tradition here in Beijing, it gave us a taste of home, and we are looking forward to the tenth annual St. Martin’s walk next year.
The night was for a good cause helping Wu Ya Chao, a nine year boy with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He is currently in Beijing Children’s Hospital and needs 11 chemotherapy treatments to recover, so every cent that is raised will be for a good cause.
