In China, Christmas Eve is actually called “Peaceful Night” (平安夜 — after the Chinese translation of the song “Silent Night”), but peaceful is the one thing it definitely isn’t. Here’s a short post about Christmas Eve in urban China, from a foreigner who’s witnessed it go from nothing to the spectacle it is today in just a few short years: Some Thoughts on “Ping An Ye” (Silent Night)
An here’s a Chinese perspective, translated into English: Christmas in Shanghai

For more about the odd creature Christmas Eve has become in China (with pictures!), see:

• Christmas Eve 2009 – Tianjin, China
• Merry… something, from Tianjin! :)
• Christmas Eve… with Chinese characteristics

From John Lennox, author and Professor in Mathematics and Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Oxford:

Is there anything worth believing in? Oh, ladies and gentlemen– I’m an old man. Let me speak to you directly.

In all my life studying different philosophies and ideas and mathematics for the sheer fun of it, I’ve never come across an idea that remotely touches this one:

“The Word became human, and dwelt among us.”

It’s not every world-class academic who could also make a good Santa. Merry Christmas!

The Posts of Christmas Past:

Christmas in general:

• Ho! Ho! Who? Santa VS. China’s God of Wealth
• Merry Christmas Music 2009!
• Christmas doesn’t have to be Made In China
• 圣诞快乐! Merry Christmas! (a Christmas poem for 2007)

Christmas in China:

• Merry Chinese Christmas… text message style
• Christmas Essentials for the Black Hole of China
• Have yourself a Chinese little Christmas…
• Christmas Eve 2009 – Tianjin, China
• Merry… something, from Tianjin! :)
• China’s grinches play hardball
• Christmas Eve… with Chinese characteristics
• An UnChristmas party in Tianjin
• “And the 2008 Tianjin Grinch Award goes to…”
• 聖誕快樂! – Shèng dàn Kuài lè! (Taiwan)
• 圣诞节 2006 Photos (Taiwan)

You can see all our Christmas stuff here.

(P.S. – That’s Merry Christmas 2011, not 2012. Ooohh… someone’s asleep at the switch!)

There are many qualified candidates for the 2011 Grinch Award, but this year it’s going to the authorities of Xitan Village in Zhejiang Province, because you just can’t violently shut down a large public Christmas party in “Christmas Village” and not get a Grinch Award. Especially when you get caught on video and uploaded to YouTube:

• A very silent night: Chinese officials shut down outdoor Christmas party in toy-making town (WP)
• Video (BI)
• Video (YouTube)

There’s actually a lot of interesting details to this situation; what details we do get suggest a complex local relationship between Christians, Buddhists, local authorities, and Christians and Buddhists who have positions of local authority.

Previous Grinch Awards:

• China’s grinches play hardball
• “And the 2008 Tianjin Grinch Award goes to…”
• An UnChristmas party in Tianjin

Pronounced: dīng dīng ​dāng
Means: “jingle bells”
For example (download mp3):

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

It’s custom in China to send people wishes via text message on the biggest holidays, sort of like what Christmas cards used to be in North America. Here’s one I received on Christmas Day from a friend:

Joel! Merry Christmas to you and Jessica and Lilian! Including yours friends and your parents, brother sisters! Merry Christmas to every Americans and Canadians!

And, for the second day of Christmas, here’s a song of hope by Over the Rhine:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

See more about Christmas in China here:

• Have yourself a Chinese little Christmas¡­
• Ho! Ho! Who? Santa VS. China’s God of Wealth
• Merry something, from Tianjin! :)
• Merry Something!
• China’s grinches play hardball
• Merry Christmas Music 2009!
• Christmas Eve­ with Chinese characteristics
• Christmas doesn’t have to be Made In China

That’s an image of the Facebook friend connections between cities. The more connections, the brighter and whiter the lines. (See an explanation of how they made it is here.) You’ll notice a few conspicuously dark areas: Brazil and Russia have more popular local social network competitors; Africa has less internet users. And then there’s China.

Christmas is the hardest time of the year to be on the other side of the world from family. Living in a FB black hole would only make it that much worse. We have a toddler, my one sister is pregnant and the other just got engaged, in addition to all the usual family fun that happens during Christmas. That’s a lot of family-ness to miss out on. Thankfully, there are ways to access Facebook (and everything else) in spite of China’s ‘harmonious’ internet. These last two weeks we’ve been burning a hole in the internets with all sharing family photos and videos back and forth. Skype, of course, is getting a good workout, too.

I have issues with FB, and if I could start again with it I would do things differently. After all, they are out to get you (they harvest and calculate your information and behaviour patterns to make you easier to manipulate for advertisers and, one day, governments. I only first started using it to stalk my sister’s then-boyfriend). But, I am thankful — very thankful — that it’s so easy to communicate between continents. We almost effortlessly and instantly share pictures, videos, and make video calls. It’s not as good as being together, of course, but we’re definitely grateful!

Merry Christmas 2010!

P.S. — And Merry Christmas from China, too:

P.P.S. — And Merry Christmas from my rock star soon-to-be-brother-in-law:

Our Christmas just got a whole lot Chinesier thanks to John at Sinoplice.com. Follow the links to download:

• The Sinosplice Chinese Christmas Song Album
• Bible Stories in Chinese (the Christmas mp3s are 001 to 007 in the New Testament)
• 圣经故事广播剧 (Chinese download site that offers each mp3 individually)

“…they injected a healthy dose of Chinese culture. Just listen to the way Mary talks to baby Jesus, or the way the Israelites argue with Aaron over creating the golden calf. And then of course, there’s the fun of hearing the voice of God in Chinese, or Abraham sounding like an old Chinese man.”

P.S.

Whatever this post is about, it is most certainly not about Christmas. If you want to read something about Christmas, follow the links:

• Christmas doesn’t have to be Made In China
• Take this, capitalist! (cute video by some TCK’s spending their first Christmas in America)
• Merry Christmas Music!

Hey! This post comes with music! Play this while you read:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Santa VS. the Chinese God of Wealth & Laughing Buddha

Nothing puts you in the holiday mood like seeing your culture’s biggest holiday reflected back at you by a foreign culture… especially when that culture is Mainland China.

The Pantheon

L to R: a laughing buddha (笑佛), the God of Wealth (财神), Santa Claus.

They’re fat, they’re red, they appear on posters and as statues, they mean people get stuff. In North America he brings “gifts” in a big sack. In China, traditionally, there’s two of him, and he’s more explicit, holding gold bars, coins and other symbols of wealth, sometimes in a big sack. But I honestly don’t see how the money god and laughing buddhas can compete with Santa.

Santa Rules
In addition to our veneer of giving in order to get stuff, we Westerners do it better than the Chinese in another important way. Typically, Chinese restaurant owners just stick up a poster or set up a statue of the God of Wealth and offer it food, wine and incense, hoping for prosperity in return. Laughing buddha figurines are popular as good luck charms, and you can rub the bellies of the big statues for peace and prosperity. But in North America we’re more creative and effective: we brainwash our kids. We get them buzzed with songs and movies and talk about toys before taking them to sit on a real live Santa’s lap. “Santa” asks them two questions: Have you been good? and, What do you want? — in a mall of all places, at the height of the biggest shopping season of the year. The kids get the point so well they don’t even realize it; it metastasizes into their developing psyches and shapes their human experience for the rest of their lives. It doesn’t matter if they grow up and lose their faith in Santa; it’s not about him. They’ve totally absorbed the idea that our biggest cultural celebration of the year revolves around wanting and getting. In other words, our patron saint of consumerism kicks butt on the Chinese money god. And surely no belly-rubbing-for-peace-and-prosperity on a jolly, golden, laughing buddha can compete with a mall Santa.

But seriously, folks…
You might think it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to generalize about Santa Claus, the God of Wealth, and laughing buddhas because they seem so fundamentally different. For example, maybe Santa’s not really a god of wealth but of consumerism. And maybe he’s not really our god of consumerism; no one except for kids attempts to bribe, placate, beseech, or otherwise cajole Santa as a spiritual being into enabling our consumption. He’s more like our idol of consumerism; the man-made physical representation of our unhinged desires to consume that helps us focus and realize those desires. And last but certainly not least, Santa is Not Jesus — maybe that’s his real name. He’s our Jesus-avoidance tool; a soothing, comfortably 100% imaginary mascot, employed as a colourful cheerleader to add lighthearted, saccharin distraction to our otherwise obscene consumption, which doesn’t look quite as bad when Jesus isn’t around. I suspect Santa’s a little bit of each. I’m not saying Santa (or gift-giving) has to be this way — it’s not like Santa’s inherently evil — just that he’s currently functioning like an omnipresent consumption mascot on steroids.

Mainland Chinese, by the way, love Santa Claus. They can’t get enough Santa Claus. He fits with the holidays: he wears red, he’s fat, he’s loaded. He means we get stuff. He’s in every other business in Tianjin around Christmas time, where he occupies the same places on walls and doors that’re sometimes occupied by posters of the money god. And how many people could honestly point him out in a police lineup with laughing buddha and the money god? So you see, we’re not so different after all.

For a look at “Christmas” in China, see:

• Merry… something, from Tianjin! :)
• Christmas Eve 2009 – Tianjin, China
• Christmas Eve… with Chinese characteristics
• Holy Santa, Batman!

Midnight on Christmas Eve 2009 in Tianjin, China (they call it “Peaceful Night” 平安夜):

If you put New Year’s, Mardi Gras, Valentine’s Day and the commercial side of Christmas into a blender and then reincarnated the unappetizing mush into an overpopulated midnight carnival, you’d have Christmas Eve in Tianjin. Clowns, stage shows, blowing artificial snow (soap-sud machines), a countdown to midnight (pictured above), and a bunch of foreigners performing Christmas carols (us) were all out two nights ago among the masses and their blinky, battery-powered headgear. In between our two performances on stage there was a choreographed Michael Jackson dance routine by five 5-foot tall pelvis-thrusting minors who looked way too young to be grabbing the front of their pants that way in public (pictured left).

Random strangers occasionally asked to get their picture taken with us, since we’re foreigners. We obliged, of course, and I got my revenge when I saw this line up of 90-pound Santas:

But it was all for a good cause. A local company decided they wanted to get into the real spirit of Christmas by holding a fundraiser for the Special Education Project. They aggressively hawked these LED Christmas candle things all day and night to the throngs of people on Tianjin’s two busiest outdoor shopping streets, which is Christmas Eve Central for T. The two girls pictured on the right had me and a friend cornered before we had a chance to tell them we were with the group they were raising money for.

Since we’re associates of the N.G.O. that was receiving the money, the company asked us to put together some songs for before and after the midnight countdown. We had a group of carolers, which included some of our local friends and students, two guitars and a flute. They wanted us to get the crowd into it, and below you can see the line of police in front of the stage holding back all our rabid 粉丝. Ok, maybe they’re not actually our fěnsī, but they were in a good mood and it wasn’t hard to get a response from the crowd; all we had to do was show up. They’re supposed to play part of it on TV today, so I may have finally made it on TV in Tianjin. :) Here’s our the helmeted crowd control:

It didn’t actually feel all that Christmasy, but at least it was something to mark the day. Actually, packing into an apartment with a bunch of friends (Chinese, German, Brazilian, Canadian, American) earlier in the evening to practice the songs over snacks and coffee wasn’t a bad way to spend a Christmas Eve. For two of my students it was the first time they’d done anything to celebrate Christmas, so that was kind of special. A few more photos below (none of these photos are mine; I was too busy playing guitar).

All these blobs are the blowing artificial snow soapsud bubbles (it looked cooler in real life):

These are the LED things they sold for the fundraiser:

If I can find any photos of us on stage, I’ll add them below when I get them.

圣诞快乐！

Friends who also wrote on this surreal experience:

• Lindy — Christmas is for Shopping…
• Rob (the other guitar player) — Merry Something!
• Shannon — Merry MardiEasterValentineHalloweenNewYearChristmas! Ho Ho Ho?

[2010 Jan 08] Here we are in the newspaper:

The caption says:

The other day Tianjin TV’s “Art & Entertainment Food 8 Street” news column at Heping Lu business walking street held a groundbreaking special evening party, not only was there brilliant cultural performances, also can’t count the many different kinds of interactive games spectators were invited to participate in. Additionally, foreign volunteers working in Tianjin from the USA, France, Italy and etc. countries also got on stage and sang impromptu songs for the audience. Newspaper reporter: Cao Tongshe

Of course, we didn’t have anyone from France or Italy, but hey, who’s counting?
[2010 Jan 18] Finally got hold of some shots of us on stage:

Other Christmas and Christmas-in-Tianjin posts:

• Christmas Eve… with Chinese characteristics
• An UnChristmas party in Tianjin
• “And the 2008 Tianjin Grinch Award goes to…”
• Christmas doesn’t have to be Made In China
• 圣诞快乐! (Merry Christmas!)
• Some Tang dynasty poetry for the Christmas we’re missing
• Take this, capitalist!
• 聖誕快樂! – Shèng dàn Kuài lè! (first Christmas in Asia)

Image (c) 2009 AFP

For some of the millions of Mainlanders who find meanings in Christmas that are deeper than shopping and dating, it is not a very merry Christmas. Click the photo to read more.