Merry Christmas, everyone!

Christmas is the period of the year when people should be kinder to each other and when they should enjoy being with friends and family and celebrate life in this beautiful world of ours.
At school, we are like a big family, so we like to celebrate important events together.
Last week, I was invited by my colleagues and some pupils of our school to see the Christmas show they prepared. They had to present it earlier than planned because they have an extra week for holidays.
It was such a beautiful show, with poems they created and carols. They even brought the "goat" and had it danced to their song. "The goat" is a traditional Romanian custom for Christmas. You can see photos from the show in my photo album.
Most of the poems presented there were created by the children at the Intercultural Vasile Alecsandri Club. If you look attentively at the photos, you cannot distinguish the Rroma children from the Romanian ones (maybe only by skin colour, in some cases). This shows the fact that they enjoy working and having fun together. And that the teachers try to make them feel good together.
I think this is what peace is all about: accepting the others and enjoying their presence and cultures.
School Vasile Alecsandri from Baia Mare, Romania, (the school where I work), is an inclusive multicultural school, as I like to call it. There are children from several ethnic groups (Romanian, Rroma, Hungarian, Ukrainians, etc.), who attend our school, and we try to make them feel good and share their cultures with us. This is why I worked hard to involve them in cultural projects, such as "Junior inventors", a Comenius multilateral project,
(http://junior-inventors.blogspot.com ) and the international art exhibitions we organize for the 8th of April,(The International Rroma People's Day), Easter and the 1st of June, The International Children's Day (according to UNESCO) (http://juniorarts.blogspot.com); and many others.
From all these projects, we all learned many things: how to respect each other, how to appreciate other people's cultures, how to appreciate our own cultures. But most of all, these projects improved the children's self esteem and the school image in the community. I think that this is what Lifelong Learning is all about.
And this makes me happy to see that I have contributed to bring a little peace in the lives of many children and the adults who got involved in these projects, and that I made a difference in their lives.
I only hope they will learn to appreciate what they learned with me.
So, this is a happy thought of mine before Christmas and the New Year.
I wish all people, friends and non-friends, merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year!