Yes Virginia…….there is Christmas in China

A friend of mine from Virginia dropped me a note a couple of days  ago in which he suggested that Christmas was probably not too well recognized here in China.  Au contraire………. 

Xiamen has a long history of association with the west, all the way back to the Dutch, who were about the first Europeans here.  And the place is among the more prosperous of Chinese cities in the middle of the trade boom where all your dollars for all that stuff for the holidays end up in or near here, all or in part, since most of what you went and bought came from China.

So it’s entirely appropriate that these friendly folks have adopted Christmas as a big commercial event and signs of it are all over.   The Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend saw the lobby tree-lighting at the Sheraton Hotel where the unhappy angel was. 

He and a bunch of kids from a music school on the small island of Guilan Yu sang a couple of Christmas songs for the amusement of a small crowd and a large wedding party sharing the lobby.  It was a little unusual to my eyes to see the angel’s and chorus in the background and the back of the wedding couple in the foreground as they greeted wedding guests entering the hotel lobby.  But standing in back of the bridal party offered a good view of a Chinese wedding ritual where every arrival discretely hands the white-gowned bride a small red envelope stuffed with cash.  The bride, with the aplomb of an illusionist, discretely stuffed each stuffed envelope into her mothers purse, itself stuffed with a whole lot of red envelopes. 

Those two got a good start. 

The kids in my classes knew the date of Christmas better than they knew the date of the end of the school term.  Some of them think I look like Santa Claus and when I joked that I actually was Santa Claus, they hit me up for their gifts………..stupid me. 

There are a number of big, multi-storied malls downtown here, one operated by a Philippino consortium is called the SM (for Shopping Mall, not for bizarre entertainment) and there is no Chinese translation which is interesting.  City busses have SM on their name-boards and if you tell any Taxi driver “SM” they know exactly where to go.  The place has six floors, a huge Walmart in the basement and rivals the biggest ones in the States.  Whole floors are  dedicated to specialities — one for furniture and an entire floor to electronics — these guys live by cell phones. known here as “mobiles.”  There is a food court as big as a football field where you can get anything from octopus and squid to funny hotdogs they eat on long sticks, kind of a cocktail party h’ordeurve on steroids.

The malls, including the SM, like malls almost everywhere got decorated for Christmas at Thanksgiving (the latter holiday is not well-recognized).  The Sheraton advertised a Thanksgiving Dinner, but their turkey missed the plane so they moved the dinner (part of a big buffet) to Friday night.  The fellow who does guest services didn’t realize that the specific day counted that much.  I’ve been to some peoples homes for thanksgiving and the interminable delays waiting for all or part of the meal suggested they and the Sheraton guy were on the same page.

Classes are held here on Christmas Day just like any other.  The holiday is completely commercial except for the Christian community which includes no few Chinese.  The first Christian Church was established in Xiamen (when it was called Amoy) in the middle of the 19th Century.   I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve got a book somewhere with the address.

So foreign teachers can actually take Monday and Tuesday off if they want to, but doing that screws up the sequence of all the class sections for the week so it’s better to keep it just another day.   January 1st is a regular holiday though, no classes at all.

So, yup Virginia, there is Christmas here………..they’re only a couple of years ahead of the States…….the whole thing is already totally commercial.