Christmas in My Home Town

Christmas in China is a (by now, predictably) strange affair. Chinese society, although pervaded by a blithe ignorance of almost all religious principles and an at best hazy understanding of what Westerners do with their leisure time broadly conceived, is unexpectedly titillated by the coming of an alien holiday that almost no one knows how to celebrate. I was shocked to come upon parts of downtown Changsha - a city with a barely-there foreign presence - festooned with Christmas decorations and blaring relatively accurate versions of holiday standards. I understand this to be a recent development in Chinese culture, which is a most distressing notion: they seem to have skipped a few steps in the evolution of Christmas and jumped right to the secularized conclusion (inelegant commercialism) without savoring the intermediate stages of piety (elegant commercialism).