A Beijing Christmas
My primary school teacher in the sixties was already quite strong on the subject of putting “Christ back into Christmas”. “Xmas” being one of Miss. Ruddy’s sign’s of those who had fallen away, I remember fearing for the salvation, Come the Day, of even my own family when I saw my mother, ordinarily no slacker in matters of religion, trace “Happy Xmas” on a just completed Christmas cake. Had Miss Ruddy been in China this Christmas, she might have reason to be more indulgent of my mother’s confectionery shorthand. Everywhere, even in early New Year, there are still signs of Xmas; department stores are Christmas themed to the gills, with glistening tree tops and jingling sleigh bells at every hands turn. Starbucks and McDonald’s are all pumping out their Christmas messages and even the more humble eateries made some attempt at putting up a decoration or even a half hearted Christmas tree, against the chill of a Beijing winter.
Unfortunately, this increasingly popular holiday has been so completely disconnected from its Christian roots that the average Chinese person associates it with the birth of Santa Claus rather than that of any deity. Certainly Santa has become the public icon of the celebration, his unmistakable whiskers are everywhere. Among those with greater education, there is an awareness of the holiday being connected with the Christian religion, and Churches of every hue were filled many times beyond capacity with the curious. The inquisitive hoards presented a dilemma for Chinese pastors this year as every year. Is it better to make this an exclusively Catholics only, ticketed event, or, at the risk of becoming a circus, to present the “real Christmas” to the hoards who come to church in search of Santa Claus?
Even the most inspired of open door policies reach only the few. For the many, the annual presentation of the Christmas story comes in the real Beijing cathedral, the shopping mall. Untrammeled by the sweet, but dangerous, message of a child born to bring good news to the poor, the Mall clergy wore Father Christmas hats and promised happiness in new shoes or the latest fragrance. This message has found a ready audience in the upwardly mobile twenty somethings who have no memory of harder times and see no reason not to have fun, and have it now.
Having been brought up in a country where Christ was still genuinely holding his own among the Xmas’ed Cakes, it is somewhat depressing to live the holiday with people who mostly see it only as an exotic interruption to the winter blues. At home, I can enjoy the parties because at some level, even among the agnostic, there is an appreciation that the frolics hearken back to Bethlehem’s joyful news. Here, without that connection, the parties remain fun, but they leave this believer at least somewhat unsatisfied. One feels, and this is strange because the challenge is as valid at home as here, that one has to be more like Christ in one’s daily life than is expected of us in our Christian countries. I feel called, hopefully without ostentation or pretence, to pay more specific attention to the poor at this time than I do spontaneously at home. When so many are just partying, the mystical dimension of Christmas, paradoxically, seems to insert itself more easily among my Christmas cards and imported homemade Christmas Pudding (thanks Una). I believe somehow that it is in this way, with an apology to the memory of my more militant school teacher, that I can help put the Christ born in a stable back into the Chinese experience of Xmas.