Life as AFAC

I ate another chocolate from my Advent Calendar and realized it’s 3 days before Christmas. My God, the year went so fast. I still haven’t finished my review for 2005 and it’s almost 2007 already! I write a yearender every year to reflect on the good and not-so-good highlights in my life, and how I can learn from them. But this deserves another blog. Back to the topic, it’s almost Christmas and I don’t feel the spirit yet.
Christmas is not celebrated in China. Which is understandable because a) it is a western culture and b) it is a Christian tradition, both of which China isn’t. So it’s ironic to see all the waiters, salesladies and KTV attendants wearing santa hats. And in China Whispers (our in-depth study on Chinese youth), respondents in five major cities were asked if they will buy a Christmas present for someone, 81% said yes!
So they kinda-sorta “celebrate” Christmas. But knowing its meaning is another story. In Beijing, the kids in my cousin’s Sunday school were asked whose birthday is Christmas day. “SANTA!!!” They all exclaim.
I don’t really blame them. In Chinese, Christmas is Sheng dan jie. Santa Claus is Sheng dan lao ren (Shengdan Old Man). So if you use a little logic, Christmas is to Christ… Shengdan jie is to Santa! You’d end up with Santa’s birthday too, hahaha!
Actually word for word, SHENG means saint or great man, DAN means born, and JIE means celebration. I found this out just now, coz I dissected the words and asked Jeffrey what each separate one meant. All these years we’ve greeting each other Shengdan Kuaile and never knew what it meant:

“A great holy man is born. Let’s rejoice!”

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 at 3:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.