Despite the furor this year about the "holy-days" dare i say holidays, its my feeling that Christmas in America became a pagan holiday devoted to Commerce many years ago. If course the excess of gifts is disguised with a family reunion and a meal but the religious element has long been a minor note.
China just seems to be one-upping us again. We may be capitalists but they have taken our lead and gone further to become super-capitalsts.
China's Yuletide Revolution
Nation's Yuppies Embracing Christmas as Time for Love; Ms. Ji, Romance and KFC
December 22, 2005
Last Dec. 24, Beijing resident Jessica Ji had one Christmas wish: a date.
The 25-year-old Web-site editor was determined to avoid a repeat of Christmas 2003, when she waited for two hours in the bitter cold to have dinner with her parents at a Pizza Hut, whose ostrich pizza is a yuletide favorite in the Chinese capital.
So Ms. Ji lined up a Christmas Eve rendezvous. She and her date ended up talking for six hours over dinner at a trendy coffeehouse. Things went so well that at 11 p.m. they decided to go to the movies. Ms. Ji sent a text message to her mother's cellphone: "I am not going back home tonight. It is Christmas Eve."
For China's yuppies, the true spirit of Christmas is romance.
Despite its commercialization, Christmas in the West is still centered on the family, with obligatory festive dinners and, often, churchgoing. In mostly atheist China, the holiday is increasingly celebrated by young urban couples, and on the street rather than at the hearth or the altar. To the Chinese yuppie fascinated by exotic foreign ways, Christmas is about oneself and one's personal relationships -- two aspects of life that both traditional Chinese culture and communist ideology play down.
At a Wal-Mart Stores Inc. location in the southern city of Dongguan, customers leave handwritten love notes as ornaments on a plastic tree. "I don't have a boyfriend now, but I wish I had one for next Christmas," reads one. Nearby, a skinny Santa mannequin sits at a table for two, complete with candles and a bottle of wine. In another display, cans of spray snow are arranged in the shape of a heart.
Shanghai's unofficial capital of Christmas is Ikea, where young professionals gather to listen to traditional Swedish Christmas carols and taste free ginger cookies and saffron bread.
