“Christmas,” says Mr. Honey, “is the day Americans celebrate the birth of Santa Claus.” Mr. Honey is a 20 year old sophomore at Guizhou University, the largest school in the poorest province in China. He sits in the front row of my Conversational English course, happily and actively participating in my lessons each week. “In our China,” he went on, “we never have a day to buy so many gifts! Americans are very lucky.”

I live in Guiyang City, nestled in the hills of western China.

I am physically and spiritually about as far as one can get from America’s culture wars. But if Mr. Honey is any indication, the War on Christmas has a new front, and 1.3 billion Chinese have weighed in on the side of secular consumption. So while another Christmas has come and gone, replete with the annual blustering and gnashing of teeth from those on the left and right in America, China reposes happily in the afterglow of a massive, Christ-induced corporate orgasm. Wal-Mart, Guiyang, is a pretty good place to go to get a sense of how the Chinese view Christmas. All of the employees wear Santa hats, and a rail thin, sickly looking boy who appears no older than 15 has been hired to play Santa himself. He has a white beard glued to his chin. He could comfortably fit into one of the legs of his red pants. He has apparently been instructed to run around the store at full speed, yelling incoherently at the customers. They love it.

“Merry Christmas,” he yells to me in English. “Why are you running around like this?” I ask him in Chinese. “Because it is time to go shopping!” he yells back. He bounds off to the dog slaughtering section of Wal-Mart, where dozens of beagle carcasses are hung from meat hooks for customer inspection; Christmas this year happens to coincide with the local dog-eating festival, and Wal-Mart is milking both holidays for all they are worth. The store is absolutely jammed with frenzied shoppers, as are all of the other high-end stores in town. Christmas Day is the exclamation mark on a week-long capitalist dream-come-true. Everyone I know has rushed out to partake in the buying spree.

There are two must-have items for a Chinese Christmas: silly string and an inflatable mallet. These items are used for the Christmas Eve party, which makes Mardi Gras look like a slow day in a nunnery. Young Chinese begin the evening by standing outside of the single Catholic Church in town. They spectate as people go inside. It feels a bit like hanging out before a Stones concert with members of the fan club. The crowd is fifteen deep, and everyone is drinking Er Guo Tou, a 100-proof paint-thinner of an alcohol that costs about ten cents a liter. By the time services let out, everyone is good and drunk. The crowd moves en-masse from the steps of the Church to the center of town, where they begin assaulting each other with their rubber mallets. A free-for-all of silly-string, vomit, and botched Christmas carols ensues. Within an hour, everyone begins stumbling home, happily numbed by the Christmas spirit.

Mr. Honey, like most other Chinese, knows the true meaning of Christmas: buying stuff. He chose his English name because he is, he claims, “a very sweet boy.” He has sweetly listened to dozens of missionaries who have come to our university in an attempt to bring this part of the world into the Christian caliphate. He sweetly nods as they preach the Bible. And he sweetly sees Santa Claus as the central symbol of Christianity, a holy sheherd of capitalism.

“I wish every day was Christmas,” Mr. Honey tells me with a smile, as he sips from a bottle of Er Guo Tou. “Does it feel this good in America?”

_Mike Levy

COMMENTS:

Yes, yet another story how christmas turned out to be a buy, buy, buy day. Do you actually know what you celebrate at christmas? The birth of a very poor boy, born in a animal's shelter. Jezus was his name, and he will change the face of the world forever. That is what need to celebrate a christmas, but who stand still about that? you only think about the present that lies beneath the once living tree...
Vitrinu S

Wow. As a Christian, this article makes me wonder what type of mission the dozens of missionaries referred to above are on. Nonetheless, the capitalist frenzy that is now growing in China alongside the burgeoning of the middle class will surely collapse upon itself the way it has in many parts of North America. Material possessions in a human being's life have definite limits, and when these limits are abused negative consequences naturally assume. Soon enough the Chinese population will recognize the directionless position that results from a life of frivolous mining of raw materials, production, and consumption. My only hope is that, once this recognization is completed, that the Chinese will search for a higher point of truth rather than decline into the spirit of narcism and nihilism that has been so widely adopted by others who've been disappointed in the fulfillment of consumption.
Hendrik Vlaar

seems evident that capitalism only means greed. Amerikkkan culture should have never gotten out of its native land.
Jamal

Amerikkkan culture has no native land.
malloreigh

It's unfortunate that the Chinese celebrate Christmas without knowing the true meaning and often even how to spell it correctly, but it's refreshing to see a country thrive on good will, even for a day, whereas America has seemed to have lost that aspect of the Holidays. The Chinese are just happy to have another chance to do something for family and friends, and to do as The West does.
Jase

I am sorry guys. I have worked in China. I know Chinese. This is not a passing fad. In fact this is capitalism and consumerism coming home. Once the full impact of Chinese capitalism hits your shores you'll realise we in the west have just experienced capitalism-light up till now. Brace yourselves cos the Chinese need and greed will affect everyone very soon, brutally and without remorse.
Hans Leo

Thank God I'm an atheist.
Mike Smith

I grew up in Singapore with many Chinese people. Seems to me the Chinese cultures is full of materialism already, even for the afterlife. For example the tradition of Burning fake money and paper mercedes benz for the next life. We cannot blame WalMart for everything.
miabestraim

Christmas is becoming Americanized all over the world; when I first moved to Spain in 1997, they celebrated Three Kings Day over Christmas, honoring Christ with a few gifts to each other, just as the three kings brought small but significant gifts to the baby Christ. By the time I moved back Stateside in 2003, Santa Claus had taken the place of the Three Kings at the local shopping center, and Christmas day was becoming the primary focus of the season. If only the self-centered ego of America could be confined to our country, instead of infiltrating a world of cultures that lived just fine without us.
megan

cool they dezerve it hahahaha
ashley huffman

Miabestraim is wrong. I blame Walmart for everything.
Anthony

Note: To eliminate spam and other abuses, all comments must be manually approved by a moderator before posting. Rarely, this can take up to a couple of days. Legitimate comments may be subject to light editing for the sake of clarity.

To foster open dialogue, pointlessly abusive or threatening comments will be deleted, as will comments that clearly violate hate speech laws in Canada (where Adbusters' servers are located). A note from the moderator will always be posted to indicate that such a comment has been deleted.

If you have any comments or concerns about this process, feel free to email websubmissions[at]adbusters[dot]org.