What China taught me about Christmas

It struck me as odd that, in the balmy winter sun of Lisbon, the Christmas decorations were all snow themed. A festive snowman here, a snowflake there, a rotund and red-faced Father Christmas traipsing through the snow elsewhere. It contrasted incongruously with the 20c degree December warmth.

The same is true elsewhere, of course. Even in the hellishly hot tropics they optimistically commit to similarly snowy displays, even if the most robust of snowmen would melt and evaporate before you could get through the first few lines of Good King Wenceslas.

The strength of such cultural manifestations should not be underplayed. Some years ago, I found myself teaching English in a godforsaken part of China, where the food caused incessant gastrointestinal distress and the insects were as large as Christmas crackers, which might explain why the locals were so keen on eating them.

Having been there for just a few months I was going doolally. The only laowai (‘old outsider’, aka foreigner) I had any regular contact with had, I regret to say, become my bête noire. I do not know where Chloe is today, but I hope she is well. Yet, at the time, the sound of her voice or the threat of her company occasioned in me sustained fits of swearing, apoplexy and despair.

Reduced to a schedule of showing bored Chinese children episodes of Mr Bean, drinking awful Chinese beer, and having my tummy incessantly protest the odd local spices and poor hygiene standards (that last part is not a slur, have you heard of gutter oil?), one might say in the modern parlance that I was not ‘living my best life’. To make matters worse, the accommodation I was provided was damp and dank, resulting in my clothes quickly becoming covered in mould.

My nadir came one evening when I attempted to kill a particularly large spider which had appeared on my wall. The size of my palm – the kind of creature I had only seen in a zoo previously – my caveman fight/flight instinct kicked in. Initially I chose fight: picking up a boot I went to whack the dastardly creature before it quite astoundingly jumped out of the way and scurried away behind a cabinet.

Giant jumping spiders? What next? My flight mechanism kicked into gear, and, vanquished, I left the room to its new occupant: the giant, terrifying leaping arachnid of Chongqing.

This depressing lifestyle – actually, I believe it is quite common among English ‘teachers’ in that part of the world, who, it must be admitted, are an often strange and bleak breed – carried on a while.

Yet as December came, these same, aforementioned incongruous Christmas decorations began to appear. A number of fat, Caucasian Father Christmases accompanied by the characters 圣诞快乐 (shèngdànkuàilè – or Merry Christmas to you and me) became a regular sight. My spirits felt uplifted by this alone.

The closer Christmas came, the better I felt. Although I had no mince pies or sherry (just more Chinese beer), I began almost obsessively to watch carol services online. The grand churches of Europe – magnificent interiors festooned with colour, light and beauty – filled to the rafters with the festive crowds and accompanied by songs of Christian praise: is there a sight more beautiful to behold?

Perhaps it was being stuck on an industrial estate just off the Yangtze River which made the spectacle even grander, but I had never appreciated my culture in the same way before then. Within my soul I began to feel the depth of Kipling’s words: “What do they know of England, who only England know?”

These visions of home hastened my return to Blighty. Having grown rapidly sick of the People’s Republic, I skulked off in the night: with the school being gated and guarded by roaming patrols, I snuck away in a Mission Impossible style, darting in and out of dark alcoves while evading capture, before flagging down the nearest taxi, throwing myself into the backseat and garbling out in broken Mandarin: “To the airport, and quickly!”

At this time of year I cannot help but consider all the Awfully Clever people at home who say, self-reverentially, that ‘England has no culture’, while our culture is, in fact, lauded by the rest of the world. It is one of the world’s truly identifiable and unique cultures. Spend some time in a deeply foreign land and you will only deny this if you are blinded by foolish demagoguery.

People come from every imaginable nook and cranny of the globe to witness the creations of our corner of Christendom, to use a word which has fallen almost entirely out of use. They fly many hours just to schlep around the detritus of our civilisation while we, the custodians of that same inheritance, regard as a bit naff and unimportant.

We are the civilisational equivalent of the spoilt rich kid whose parents have given every opportunity and luxury in life. With nothing to compare it to, however, we take this all for granted.

It will only be when it is taken away that we realise the value of what we had. As pubs close and churches shutter, what was once a common legacy begins to wane in drips and drabs. Then, all of a sudden, we will wake up to realise that the work of our ancestors has been neglected, sold off or simply thrown away.

And so back to Kipling’s words. The problem, as I see it, is not that we have an elite who only know England, but rather that we have an elite who don’t even know that. They don’t, it appears, know anything: just an amalgam stew of globalised nothingness, which is as nourishing as the diarrhoea-inducing slop I once ate while dining at China’s less salubrious street food vendors.

Hopefully, dear reader, you will have something far more delicious to eat this Christmas than that. We each only have so many Christmases in us, so let us be merry at this festive time of year and forget, at least for now, the impending disasters around us. It is our duty to enjoy life as much as possible despite the onerous, vitality-loathing killjoys who govern us.

Let us celebrate Christmas to the fullest.