Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Ping An Ye

Well, it’s Christmas Eve here in Beijing.  We haven’t really had any snow this year despite record cold winds blowing in off the Gobi.  As I wrote last year, there are Christmas decorations EVERYWHERE here.  And unlike the US, the decorations don’t say “Happy Holidays” or “Enjoy Your Festive Non-Denominational End of Year Celebration” but they actually use the word “Christmas.”

You come to a country where religion is outlawed and you see “Merry Christmas” everywhere. In the US, a country with a right to religious freedom written in the Constitution, and businesses are terrified of saying “Merry Christmas” for fear of offending someone.

Tonight and tomorrow night I’ll be with my friends, eating turkey and other traditional Christmas fare, all of us far removed from our families back home.

Update: I had some kind of weird formatting issue with the previous post and this one, the other one wouldn’t display properly, so I deleted it.  I’ll see if I can dig it out of a cache and repost it.