Christmas provides us all a time to relax after a long year of work or study. The cold weather pressures us inside, close to our loved ones, where we pass the evening before the soothing crackle of a fire. As expected, that's not the case in China. One of our early cultural sessions began with the advice that whatever we think naturally as Americans, the opposite is true in China. I naturally thought that this was hyperbole… and with just this first thought, I proved my teacher's advice to be true. Everything is indeed totally counterintuitive here, from drinking hot drinks in summer to the basics of righty-loosey and lefty-tighty. You can imagine then, how a relaxing holiday such as Christmas quickly becomes a time for egging strangers in the streets, sillystringing passing cars, and giving out apples which have been completely engulfed in plastic wrapping. It was explained to me that the apples come from similarity of the Chinese name for Christmas Eve (Ping an jie) and the Chinese word for "apple" (Ping guo), but as for the eggs and sillystring… feel free to hypothesize. My best guess is that MaoZeDong watched The Nightmare Before Christmas one year, and took the story a little too literally. When a young gun sprayed one of my friends with silly string, Adam, a fellow volunteer, and I ended up joining in the festivities of Hallowistmas, and covered his face with what had to be toxic shaving cream. Nothing screams Christmas like retaliation and escalation.
The party that we had that night was also a mish-mash of both Jewish and Christian traditions. Our Cranukkah celebration began with the lighting of the menorah, and concluded with a white elephant gift exchange. After the dust had settled over Zunyi and several games of risk had been played till completion, I left with a box of Hungry Jack pancake mix and a bag of Hershey's Chocolate Chips. Despite China's attempts to the contrary, I still got my Christmas cookies.
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