Today is the eleventh of January, 2007, and I have yet to come up with a pithy summary of Christmas, 2006, in Lanzhou. This year the holidays left me feeling perplexed and a little blue. Everyone I have asked agrees with me that the evidence of commercial Christmas here was much greater than in 2005. Last year I would have described it as scattered; this year, pervasive.

My students were obsessed with the holiday. They gleefully decorated a tree in our office with construction-paper ornaments while singing Jingle Bells to the tune of a cassette tape. Those were some of the brightest hours of the season. I attended only one of the many student Christmas parties. Here I need to interject that "party" in the Chinese university signifies an amateur performance event rather than a social gathering. Parties vary, but they all have some common characteristics. They almost always last too long (this one was over three hours), are held on cold nights in unheated space, and involve a malfunctioning public address system. (That last characteristic is true of public gatherings in general, including worship services.) The Christmas party I attended included refreshments, and the head table where I sat with two other teachers was draped in red velvet. We three special guests were given Coke, orangeade, unshelled sunflower seeds and melon seeds, a delicacy. The students shared sunflower seeds, a feast evocative of Tiny Tim. For my contribution, I sang Silent Night in Chinese and English. I was in poor voice, but that didn’t diminish the students’ delight. Their enthusiasm for the littlest things – an off-key foreign teacher’s song, a dry and labor-intensive snack food – makes me marvel and at the same time breaks my heart.

Below: The entrance to the Catholic Church on Christmas Eve. The pint-sized creche is hidden behind the giant Christmas tree, facing the church door. I think this may be a concession to the Chinese law prohibiting churches from advertising religious beliefs.

Rae and I worshiped together at Xiao Gou Tou Jiao Tang on Christmas Eve, where she was enlisted to read the Epistle in English, and we both carried candles to the altar in the offertory procession. Our new young curate, Father Peter, read the gospel in English. Rae and I were as proud as couple of aunties, since we’ve been giving him weekly English lessons. (We are the only non-Chinese people in the parish, so it’s clear that the use of English is not for our benefit. I think it’s intended to capture the interest of children and youth in the congregation.) In spite of being included in the festivities, I went home feeling cold and hungry. There was a brass band, an enthusiastic choir, lots of bright lights. In all the razzle-dazzle, the wonder of Christ’s birth got lost.

There was a public controversy about Christmas in China this year; you may have read about it. I sympathize with the protesting students, but my reasons are different. They are concerned that western customs are polluting and diluting Chinese traditions. My concern is that the Chinese version of Christmas is an empty imitation of the western tradition, the true Christian celebration of the Nativity of Our Lord. The Chinese term for Christmas is Shengdan Jie – literally, Festival of the Holy Birth. Yet somehow, Santa has become a sacred icon, and his image is in the church as well as the supermarket. He’s a two-dimensional cardboard cutout, and as such he symbolizes, for me, the spirit of Christmas in China.

Below: some happy angels and the festive ark that bore the Christ child to the manger.

On Christmas Day, two of my former students stopped in. We slurped down big bowls of noodle soup and whiled away the afternoon in lazy conversation. They weren’t much interested in Christmas; it was refreshing.

More tales from the exam room. I used the same format for the final exam in oral English as I had for the midterm – each student had a minute or two to tell a story about the images in a New Yorker cartoon with the caption removed. Many of the best stories were prompted by a sketch of a farm field with two hens in the foreground and four others in the background. In one tale, one hen challenges the other to an egg-laying contest. In another, a chicken couple laments that Christmas is coming and they haven’t taught their four chicks to dance and sing. On a grimmer note, the two hens decide to take their chicks and migrate because pollution is destroying their food supply and the health of their children! A picture of a man in a hospital bed talking with his doctor brought out more than one story about difficulty raising money to pay for medical treatment. And, once again, a window opened on traditional Chinese culture and beliefs. One cartoon showed two middle aged women gazing at a man’s framed photo. In most stories, the man was a deceased relative. One girl related that the women were sisters, one of them the widow the man in the photo. They were about to set out to find a new husband for the widow, and were seeking the advice and blessing of the late husband.

Perhaps you’re thinking that it would be more fair and objective to use the same cartoon for all students, and you are right. But I prize my sanity, and I heard 270 of these speaking performances in just four days. In any case, the news would spread like a wildfire among the freshmen, and many would gain an unfair advantage over the first ones to see the cartoon.