The Holidays: China-Style

The Christmas Tree that we decorated during our Christmas Decorating Party.

The presents underneath are from our school-wide Secret Santa gift exchange.

Despite the fact that I am attending an intercultural center founded, funded, and fueled by both the American and Chinese sides, the holidays here were oddly unilateral feeling. That is to say, the structure of the school calendar seems to completely ignore the West's most important holiday season, including Christmas, Hanukkah, and the change of the calendar year (while allowing for a substantial break for Chinese New Year). With the exception of one day off on January 2 for New Year and two school-wide dinners prepared in the cafeteria, not only did school charge ahead as usual, but the mundane nature was compounded by looming end-of-term papers and finals. Usually the holidays in the United States mean a pause from school or work in which people relax and spend time with family. With little relaxation and no family, many Western students here felt the holidays just weren't the holidays.

On the other hand, though the calendar structure seemed to ignore the holiday season, the students worked hard to counteract that, arranging decoration parties, Christmas parties, secret Santa draws, holiday movie screenings, and cookie baking and decorating. My friends and I even decided to do a secret Santa of our own, gathering the day after Christmas in one of our favorite restaurants (the local Indian restaurant). My friends and I baked hundreds of sugar cookies for everyone at the school to enjoy during our student-run holiday party, and one of my good friends and I spent the entire afternoon in the cafeteria kitchen cooking some Western food so that our Christmas dinner wasn't exclusively Chinese food. My friend, who is beautifully Italian, made pasta with homemade sauce while my roommate, some other friends and I peeled 80 apples and hand-grated 15 kilos of potatoes for my family tradition of applesauce and latkes. Making a time-honored family Hanukkah recipe scaled up to feed the whole school for Christmas dinner in China with a Chinese roommate and an Italian friend was an unusual set of circumstances that more or less represents the amalgamation of holiday traditions that presided over our holiday season.

While the holidays did not feel like the traditional holidays I have spent at home, they nonetheless brought a certain festive cheer to the center. They also created a mutual longing for tradition that united the center in a new way. One friend opened presents with her family over Skype on Christmas morning, another spoke to her mother as the clock struck midnight on New Years here in China, and yet another bought an entire sack of Chinese peanut-brittle "Because it's Christmas and at Christmas you eat peanut brittle."

Shanghai's Xintiandi district lit up for Christmas