A Very Chinglish Christmas

“So, do they even celebrate Christmas over there?”

My family and friends back home repeatedly asked this question as the holiday season approached. The answer is yes. And no. In China, Christmas isn’t about the birth of Jesus. In fact, I’m beginning to doubt that many of them know he has anything to do with it at all. Something tells me that a little something called immaculate conception would blow their minds.

Instead of The Big Man Upstairs, Christmas in China revolves around The Big Man Up North, as in the North Pole – Santa Claus (or shèng dàn lǎo rén, which translates literally into fat, old man). When I relayed this information to my Dad, he grumbled, “Sounds like what a lot of people think Christmas is over here. Too much Santa, not enough Jesus.” I probably didn’t respond the way he wanted me to, which would’ve been something along the lines of, “Ba hum bug! You’re right. Children are so spoiled these days.” But hearing him say that only made me homesick because, geez, that is just so something my Dad would say.

Buffin and I did our best to celebrate the most wonderful time of the year as if we were back home. In an effort to make up for the lack of Christmas in our lives, we “splurged” on holiday décor in Old Town. You know how all of the Christmas crap you buy in America says “Made in China” on it? Well, we went straight to the source. Ornaments, snowflakes, bows, jingle bells – basically, Christmas had a few too many eggnogs and threw up in our kitchen. And, thanks to Buffin, I filled my iPod with all of the holiday music I’d been lacking so I could jam out on the metro. (Don’t ask me how a little Jewish girl got such a delightfully Christmas-stacked iTunes library).

On Christmas Eve, (after our church plans were foiled since the service was in Chinese, imagine that!) we met up with J+B for drinks at Cotton’s, an expat-y restaurant/bar in the French Concession. It was amazingly warm inside – we’ve learned that anywhere that caters to Westerners sucks it up and pays for central heating, which is why Starbucks has become our Mecca – and we grabbed a table by the fireplace. Aside from the obnoxious children who insisted on continually popping balloons by us (God, smite me down if I become one of those parents who brings their children to fancy establishments), we had a lovely evening sipping “adult” hot chocolates – the adult part being the cognac. Precious J+B surprised us with Christmas presents wrapped in the pages of a severely outdated US Weekly (B shares our affinity for trashy gossip rags) and adorned with the last remaining vestiges of B’s Ice Queen costume from Paige and Emily’s Tacky Christmas party the weekend before.

We woke up on Christmas morning and made pancakes and scrambled eggs for breakfast. Purchased for the equivalent of $12 USD, Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup never tasted so good. After opening the stockings that my sister had shipped to us (candy and scarves and makeup – oh my!), I got a chance to video Skype with the whole fam damily back in Houston, what I’d been looking forward to all week. Since it was still Christmas Eve in The States, everyone was over at my cousins’ house. The laptop was passed around the living room, and I got face time with every member of my extended family. I only got an eensie weensie bit teary-eyed, and considering that Christmas Eve at The Finnegans’ is my absolute favorite night of the entire year, I’m pretty shocked that I didn’t have a full-fledged meltdown.

Next, we snuggled up in the twin bed to watch Meet Me in St. Louis, one of my all-time favorite holiday movies. Judy Garland's rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” gets me every time. Luckily I had an entire box of Dots XL (thanks to Mariann’s stocking) to shovel in my mouth to stave off any Christmas melancholy. As per her usual routine, Buff fell asleep halfway through.

We had a late lunch at Element Fresh, our favorite Western restaurant, before going over to Liz’s apartment that evening. We brought mini PB+J sandwiches with an angel imprinted on them via cookie cutter (a.k.a. Holy Sammies) and cider, which we’d made with one of the Cider Beetles from our stockings. [Another one of my favorite Christmas traditions, Cider Beetles are these magical little doodads from the Houston sandwich shop, Picnic. It has everything in it you need to make cider (just add apple juice) – cinnamon, cloves, brown sugar, and a whole bunch of other stuff I can’t identify. Plus, all the ingredients are arranged in the shape of a little beetle. Too cute.]

It turns out that if you have a wall heater, a space heater, apartment lights, additional Christmas lights, a television and a DVD player on at the same time in a ghetto Chinese apartment, you will inevitably blow a fuse. Which we did. So while it was being repaired (the only positive thing about Christmas in China – nothing is closed and no one has the day off from work) we entertained ourselves by passing around a Cosmopolitan and reading aloud the “true” embarrassing stories with the help of the flashlight function on Buffin’s cell phone. It was a ridiculous sight to behold. A little pathetic, to be sure, but mainly just ridiculous. And, remaining true to the old cat ladies that we’ve morphed into, we were in bed by 10.

Truthfully, I feel like I took a year off from the entire holiday season. It’s like Thanksgiving and Christmas didn’t even happen. But, apparently, it will be waiting for me when I get home. I’ve been promised some Christmas shopping and my dad even offered to keep up the decorations, which I kindly declined. A Christmas tree in February screams “Fire hazard!” more than it says “Merry Christmas!” My sweet friends have offered to throw a “Christmas in July” party, which is probably more of an excuse to get drunk and pretend like we’re still in college than it is to celebrate Christmas with me, but, hey, I’ll take it.

So here’s to Christmas 2010. Looking forward to it.

圣诞老人 is Coming to Town!

I am dreaming tonight of a place I love

(That would be the grand city of Houston, Texas)

Even more than I usually do

And although I know it's a long road back (Try 7,446 miles)

I promise you...

I'll be home for Christmas

You can count on me

Please have snow humidity and mistletoe Uncle Bill’s hot cheese dip

And presents by the tree

[Hint, hint: new Tory Burch flats (China killed mine), Central Market cooking lessons, every movie Katharine Hepburn ever made, a weekend at Lake Austin Spa]

Christmas Eve will find me

Where the love light gleams

(Jk! It won’t find me with this alleged “love light.” It will find me here. In China.)

I'll be home for Christmas

If only in my dreams

(Looks like dreams will just have to suffice for both Bing and me this year)

Merry Christmas from The Far East!

xx,

Hallie

Sojourn to Xi'an

When Buffin and I first moved into our apartment, we put up a Longhorn football calendar in the kitchen that we’d filled in with important dates. National Day in Beijing? Check. My birthday? Check. A visit from Buffin’s dad? Check. Uncle Hal in town? Check. When we got to Shanghai all the way back in August, December 3rd – the date that Buffin’s mom (Allison) and grandma (Mimi) were scheduled to come – seemed ages away. But, before we knew it, November was over and it was time to welcome the Nathan girls to China.

On Thursday night, we flew to Xi’an to meet up with Allison and Mimi, who had made a pit stop in Beijing first. But it wouldn’t be a true "Buffin & Hallie Chinese Adventure" without a mishap or two. It turned out to be one of the most frightening plane experiences of my life as I watched Buffin suffer a bonafide panic attack right next to me. I rubbed her hands, massaged her earlobes (a stress relieving trick I no doubt heard about on Oprah) and tried to distract her by loudly discussing the clothes on every single page of the Vogue we had brought with us. “I’M SO READY FOR THESE HAREM PANTS TO JUST GO AWAY! AREN’T YOU?!" I’m sure the other passengers thought we were raving lunatics.

We arrived in one piece, thankfully, to find our lovely guide Serena holding a sign at the arrivals gate that read: “Ann Golias and Martha Hablinski.” Ooh, how glamorous! I kind of felt like I was a Kardashian or a Gosselin – someone who has no business being famous and “important.” On our ride to the hotel, Serena gave us a brief history lesson on Xi’an, capital of the Shaanxi Province. I wasn’t really listening because I was dying to ask her why she chose her English name, which has become my new favorite question. “Please let it be from Gossip Girl. Please let it be from Gossip Girl.” It was. Her bangs were also ever-so-slightly crooked, meaning that she probably trims them herself. In a nutshell, she was a girl after my own heart.

When we pulled up to the hotel around 11 p.m., Allison ran outside to meet us in her pajamas. It’s because of things like this that I just love, love, love her. She is a hoot. (And if Allison’s a hoot, then Mimi is a hoot and a half – she wore a surgical mask throughout our entire trip because she was afraid of the germs and pollution). We were quickly ushered inside and up to our room where we soon collapsed onto the giant, fluffy bed and were lulled to sleep by what has become an almost mythical sound – central heating.

The next morning we set out to tackle the city of Xi’an in one day, which turned out to be an easy fete since we had a personal guide and accompanying van to shuffle us to and fro the tourist sites:

• The Terracotta Factory: Our first stop was a terracotta factory where they craft miniature replicas of The Terracotta Army and other goods. They (allegedly) use clay from Mount Lishan, the same material used to make the authentic Terrracotta Warriors all those years ago. We got the grand tour of the place – the potter’s wheels, the kilns and so on. We even watched as men painted intricate designs on vases, all done by freehand. It was pretty amazing. The tour concluded with a stop in the “gift shop” – a giant warehouse chock full of terracotta crap. Our experience here was the first sign of Allison and Mimi’s shopping addictions, which continued to manifest itself throughout the trip.

• The Terracotta Army: Next, it was on to the real deal. The Terracotta Army was discovered in 1974 by local farmers who were drilling a well. More than 8,000 soldiers, 100 chariots and 700 horses were buried in 210 B.C. to protect Emperor Qin Shi Huang in the afterlife – the same man who ordered the construction of a little thing now known as The Great Wall of China. You may have heard of it. Each soldier is unique, and it is believed that they were modeled after real people. Pit #1 – the most imposing of the three – is housed in what can best be described as an airplane hangar. Row after row of warriors fill the room. In the back is “The Hospital”, where the soldiers are reconstructed by archaeologists (very few were actually found intact). Pit #2 is dark and, honestly, kind of creepy and depressing. Most of the warriors inside are still in shattered pieces. What is interesting in here, however, is the formation of horses and a seemingly invisible chariot – it was made of wood and has since rotted. Pit #3 is mostly untouched since archaeologists are waiting for more advanced preservation techniques to be discovered before excavating any more warriors. One of their hopes is that they will be able to maintain the warriors’ paint, which fades quickly after the figures are unearthed. The final pit also featured a few of the rare warriors that were found in one piece. It gave me goosebumps to be somewhere so deeply steeped in history and see things that were more ancient than I could fathom.

• The Shaanxi Provincial History Museum: We made a brief stop here after seeing The Terracotta Army. It was nice to have a guide with us who could actually explain the significance of what we were seeing. Each exhibit was dedicated to a different dynasty – a concept I’m still trying to wrap my head around. I get my Qins and my Mings and my Songs and my Hans all confused. My favorite piece was a solid gold figurine called “The Monster,” so named because it has the beak of a bird, the antlers of a deer and the body of a horse. “It is worth all of Hong Kong!” Serena said.

• The Xi’an City Wall: We made it to the city wall just as the sun began to set, optimal picture-taking time. It is one of the oldest and best-preserved Chinese city walls, dating back to 194 B.C. However, it’s been rebuilt countless times and the existing wall is from the Ming Dynasty, circa 1370. We got some great shots of the city and the distant bell tower. And, naturally, there was a very Chinese-y pagoda on top of the wall that we posed with, too. At this point in the day it was positively frigid and Mimi was a riot in her head-to-toe black ensemble, complete with hooded coat and ever-present surgical mask. “She looks like Slim Shady!” Allison laughed. I’m not sure what was funnier, Mimi in her ghetto getup or the fact that Allison likened her mother to rap superstar, Eminem.

• Night Market: After a delicious dumpling dinner (whoa, someone sure loves to alliterate) we paid a visit to the bustling night market in the Muslim Quarter. There was booth after booth of the grossest food I have ever laid eyes on. And the intermingling smells, my God, the intermingling smells. Not to say that it wasn’t a pleasant experience. I actually had a blast. Especially when we came across a shoe shop selling Chinese-slipper-like footwear. We each bought a pair (or in Mimi’s case, several) and stowed them away in our sweet suitcase-cum-shopping bag that Allison was toting around. After satisfying Allison and Mimi’s shopping addiction, we enjoyed a very memorable ride home. A lack of cabs combined with freezing temperatures forced us to adopt a form of transportation that, under normal circumstances, we would have never considered. Enter the motorized rickshaw. It’s China’s answer to the pedicab, but a hell of a lot more frightening than its American counterpart. It’s built for two people, but we somehow squeezed four women and one shoe-filled suitcase into the contraption. Buffin and I weren’t even sitting on a real seat – it was just a sliver of the back of the driver’s bench. We sped through traffic as cars and motorcycles whizzed by. Most of the time I had my eyes closed. Mimi, who insisted on holding open the sheet/curtain because “if I don’t see where I’m going I’m gonna get claustrophobic!” wondered aloud if he was taking us to an opium den. Luckily, he was not. Upon arriving at our hotel, Allison said, “Don’t tell your dad we did this!” Hopefully he happens to skip this part of the blog.

Two days later, back in Shanghai, we bid farewell to the Nathan girls, who were off to Hong Kong before heading back to The States. It’s hard to believe that our last visitors have already come and gone. There are only a few more things left to cross off our calendar – but Xi’an is certainly one I won't be forgetting any time soon.