Celebrating Christmas in the Small Chinese City of HuaiHua

As the enoVate blog opens its doors to more and more contributors, both of Chinese and international pedigree, we will post their interesting and relevant viewpoints. As this Friday is Christmas we are posting some unique perspectives on Chinese youth and Christmas in smaller cities in China. Our second post in this series comes from Jonathon Crowder. He currently lives in Shanghai and works for a “foreign-owned law firm dealing in corporate business and international trade.” He also writes an excellent blog entitled, Jonathon in China. Check out his post!

If you are in Shanghai during the Christmas season the outright commercialization of this Western holiday is hard to miss. Even in outside large coastal cities like Shanghai the holiday is still used relentlessly by companies in their marketing. Yet Christmas is almost never celebrated in the traditional European sense here in China, so why do companies and the Chinese people even care about it? The Chinese people don’t skip over Christmas, they just celebrate it differently.

This is my first Christmas season in Shanghai, but last year I was a high school English teacher in the city of Huaihua (怀化) in far western Hunan province. This so-called “third tier” city had much of the same commercialization you find in the large coastal cities like Shanghai, but the population was largely Han Chinese and there were basically no foreigners. The only people who did anything to celebrate the holiday were students and young professionals.

For a holiday in China to become a family affair the government generally needs to designate the holiday as a national vacation, since families are often spread out far and wide in this country. Christmas has no such designation. The Chinese people are stuck at school or work for the holiday, making its celebration informal and largely among friends, classmates and coworkers.

At the high school I worked at in Huaihua most of the students boarded at the school and their families lived far away in the outlying towns and villages. For my students, who were all first year high school students and all around 15 years old, this meant that they were in class on Christmas. A Chinese high school is by nature a never-ending academic boot camp, so any excuse to celebrate with friends and escape the strict daily routine of lectures and night study is enthusiastically embraced.

Since Christmas is not a traditional Chinese holiday and has no official mandate from the government to be celebrated Chinese students can literally make it into whatever they want, as long as they get to class on time. Some of my classes took the time to decorate their classrooms with Christmas decorations (the local market was full of Christmas knick-knacks manufactured in China) and write Christmas greetings on the blackboard. Almost all the students sent their friends (and foreign teacher) Christmas text messages, often written in English, which largely praised friendship or wished the receiver a happy holiday. Some students bought their friends small gifts and many ate dinner outside with friends rather than in the school cafeteria. Those lucky few students that had a boyfriend or girlfriend would do something special for the other person, whether it was a stuffed animal, movie ticket or dinner out.

One of the things about Christmas in China is that it is seen as a learning experience. Every middle school student in China studies English and celebrating Christmas is considered an extension of that study. My fellow high school English teachers told me to teach the students about the holiday, it is considered something that a student should know about to fully understand the English language. I was always being asked by the school and my students to not only teach English but also American culture.

In the same vein, I actually hosted an English competition on Christmas Eve in a rural city near Huaihua called Zhijiang (芷江) in, of all places, a Catholic church. In between the two Christmas Eve masses a local private English school for young students had rented out the church for an English language pageant. The show was a bizarre mix of children in costumes dancing, English songs, and trivia questions asked by me. The parents eagerly photographed their children performing songs and skits, which often had no connection to Christmas but all involved English in some way or another. The pervading sense was that having a Christmas pageant was a great way to understand western culture, a necessary step for success in learning English and, therefore, success in life.

From what I’ve seen, Chinese teenagers and young professionals use the holiday as an excuse to hang out with friends. An informal survey in my Shanghai office shows that dinner, seeing a movie, or going to KTV with friends are the most popular activities on Christmas, and whether one lives in a metropolis like Shanghai or a growing city like Huaihua this line of thinking seems to hold true. Seeing all those kids dancing to American songs last Christmas Eve I can’t help but think as younger Chinese grow older this holiday is going to become more important, though never in ways that foreigners like me will fully understand.