Christmas in China must be split into my experience and the experience of Chinese people. My experience was a little sad. I rang my family thanks to the wonder of VoipCheap, an internet phone service which I feel certain is cheaper than Skype and does the job really well. For a very low fee I was able to spend time talking to the people I love thousands of kilometers away in Australia. First I got up early and rang my children, and their mother who I love dearly in a different way from before. Then I went back to bed. Later, when I got up again, it was time to call my sister’s place and talk to her and my brother-in-law and nephew and my mother. Later, I called my other sister and spoke with her and my brother-in-law. After all that I was sad because that is the time when I remember to miss them.
In the meantime millions of Chinese city people were shopping. Christmas here is a shopping festival and the streets are awesomely full of people queuing to get inside the shops to take advantage of the great bargains available. As most people know, many Chinese are happy to barge in front of people who politely queue so there is an element of danger and the possibility of being crushed. Needless to say I went nowhere near these places, but just stayed at home with BMW.
There is almost no understanding of the reasons why Christmas exists and even of what the difference is between Santa Claus and Jesus Christ. How they have both contributed separately to the meaning of Christmas in the Western mind is inaccessible to most Chinese. I proved the difficulty of the concepts involved inadvertently when I later set a couple of exam questions around the topic. Despite having gone over the cultural idea of Christmas and its origins quite thoroughly I found myself gasping at the wild nature of some of the responses. So, as I said, Christmas in China is a shopping festival and nothing more.