Christmas in China — Myriad Misadventures

There’s no Christmas in China.

There are no holidays at all in China.

Those two things are not true, one more obviously than the other.

There’s a little Christmas here. The kindergarten at my school has some Christmas trees up. There’s Christmas music playing at Starbucks (there are a lot of Starbucks in Shenzhen). Some stores have some decoration or sales. You see some trees in malls and places like that. But China doesn’t really celebrate Christmas. I feel like it’s mostly used here as an extra way to try to sell stuff. Something to give them another season or event. Although it’s kind of like that nowadays in a lot of places…

And of course China has holidays. It just has its own holidays. Instead of buying everything on Black Friday you buy everything on Double 11. Instead of seeing your family on Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter you see them during the Lunar New Year Festival.

This is sort of a double edged sword. On the one hand you get to experience a whole new culture’s worth of holidays. But on the other hand you lose all of the holidays you grew up with. How hard this hits depends on where you’ve moved abroad. When I lived in Spain the holidays were similar. They celebrated Christmas and Easter much as I did back home for example. But here in China the holidays are completely different.

It’s a pretty big shock when you first move abroad and that first big holiday rolls around and you can’t celebrate it the way you’re used to celebrating it. But it’s sort of evened out when the first big local holiday rolls around and you get to see how it’s celebrated. And honestly once you’ve been abroad long enough you stop missing the holidays quite so much. So while everyone back home is posting pictures of their Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas trees (less this year I guess) you feel happy for them but don’t really miss it too much yourself. Or at least I don’t. Maybe everyone else does.

So while the holidays may be coming up I find that having been abroad so long I don’t really miss them too much. I just...sort of celebrate them in my own muted way.

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