Childrens Day is an annual event in Thailand, held on the second weekend in January, where a lot of effort is put into making a special day for all children.

Personally I prefer it to Xmas as there is no religious pretence, just blatant spoiling of the children for a day.

Indeed many children get more than one day as the schools often hold their own ‘Childrens Day’ on the Friday, as they did at Pasak School, where I teach.

It was not an easy decision as to where to take the children from Stratton House on Childrens Day; so many events, large and small, to choose from.

In the end we elected to follow advice given by a local friend and take them to Airforce 41 Base, close to Chiang Mai Airport, where, we were told , there would be several aircraft on display and lots of interesting stuff going on.

Hindsight is a pretty useless thing as, but in hindsight it was not such a good descision for us.

It certainly was a big affair with thousands of local families attending. Our problem was the numbers and lay-out. From the car parking area there was quite along route to walk to get to where all the aircraft and activities were.

This route was lined with hundreds of stalls selling all manner of clothes, toys, nic-nacs, food, etc; so many distractions for the kids within a narrow walkway packed with hundreds of people.

Within 10 minutes we had lost the two older boys. Although confident that they could look after themselves we still needed to locate them incase an emergency caused us to need to leave. Everyone had been issued with a card with phone number to ring if our group got seperated.

Leaving the other children at The Bouncy Castle with Wasana, our house Mum, myself and Boon went on a search. Nearly 2 hours later after much searching and numerous tannoy calls we bumped into the 2 boys on the way back to the car, blissfully unaware of the stress they had caused.

Lucky it was Childrens Day and they got away with  stern instruction not to wander off again. In view of the crowds and difficulty in keeping the group together we then left Airforce 41 and drove into Chiang Mai to Kad Suan Kaow Shopping Mall where there was a special Childrens Day playground set up in the centre ‘garden’.

After lunch in the Food Court in the lower level of the Mall we took the Children to the fun and games in the central garden area.

The two older boys were given the job of acting as extra eyes to keep an eye out for the younger ones as they joined the fun.

Being a much more contained area the crowds were not such a problem and the kids had a great afternoon.

It was late afternoon , early evening when they got their special Childrens Day surprise, made possible by the generous efforts of the Faa Gamma fundraising team in Australia.

The team kindly held a special Xmas appeal to raise money to purchase bicycles for the children to use and enjoy.

We were able to buy four bicycles for the children to share and these were presented to the children on their return to Stratton House.

Apologies for the poor photo quality.

Many thanks to our good friend Heather and all her team; the kids love the bikes and use them everyday as soon as they return from school.

For more photos from Childrens Day please visit our photobucket album here.

On New Years Eve we took the children to the the annual Cold Season fair, held at City Hall, Chiang Mai. Very popular with the local population, it is a huge event, with many stalls, stages and fair ground rides. We arrived at around 6.30pm just after dark and the children were immediately excited to see the lights of the fair ground rides. There is so much to see at this festival that you could walk round for hours. Later in the evening there would be several different live acts performing on the various stages.

As is typical at such events there were hundreds of food, clothing, and toy stalls as well as many other displays fo things like mobile phone services, car showrooms, etc.

The fair ground rides were basic but very good value and our children spent time on a Merry-go-round, the Bouncy Castle, a Ghost House and the ‘Big’ Wheel.

The two older boys, Dtu and Tai tried their hands at Balloon bursting with darts and Dtu managed to win a cuddly bear.

We strolled around the various stalls and bought some colouring books for use back home and the children appeared to have a really good time.

The most popular event turned out to be a Snake show that we came across by chance.

Jack heard the announcer and pulled us to an area behind the stalls, where the show was just starting.

I’m not sure about the ethics of the show, involving a boy who looked to be about 12 baiting a viper of some sort to show its very painful looking fangs.

Several other snakes were featured including a Cobra which an older boy appeared to hypnotise inbetween out right baiting.

The older leader of the show, as well as talking all the way through, later performed some simple magic tricks which fascinated and amused the children no end.

By the time we got home at just after 10 the children were all too tired to wait for midnight so we had a quiet transition into 2010.
For more photos please visit our photobucket album here.