Christmas in China (Part II)

As a follow-up to my earlier post, I would only add that while Christmas (as a religious affair) remains a minority's business, Christmas as part of popular culture is alive and well. Many shopping malls in Beijing would blast Christmas music throughout much of December. Company offices were decorated with all kinds of Christmas motifs, ranging from white Santa pin-ups (so far I haven't heard from ethno-nationalists complaining about companies getting too decked out by white faces) to blinking Christmas trees (quite a full circle, considering that China is the world's manufacturer of plastic trees and blinking lights). To be sure, Christmas has become the marketer's gift from God --no pun intended --it provides a preprogrammed, westernized theme according to which products and services are repackaged and marketed. To this day, my local Sichuan restaurant still has a "Christmas special" that includes three dishes and a soup -- a fairly unprovocative combination of beef, pork and vegetables that could allude to anything but, at least to me, Christmas. I mean, could the restauranteur at least have concocted some dishes that are more marginally related to Christmas, or at least have renamed them with a more representative portraiture of the holy day...such as, if you shall bear with me, 白色聖誕, for 水蒸豆腐...much in the same way restaurants would for 春節 dishes, such as 年年有餘? Christmas in China, like Christmas in Hong Kong, is essentially a month-long shopping and dining orgy during which consumers spend and marketers market, all in the name of the holy spirit. I can't help but think that it won't be moral philosophy but 21st century consumerism that will eventually marginalize theology --just as jingle bells get droned out by the endless ringing of the marketer's bloated cash registers.