The Christmas spirit has done gone and bitten me in the ass.
At the risk of sounding like a sappy old Christmas special with the inevitable talking animals and dancing snowmen: Christmas can touch you no matter where you are.
It doesn't matter how many presents you get, how much snow is on the ground, how many people wish you a happy holidays, how big your tree is or how tight your shoes are. It's not the quantity of Christmas - no, no, my dear friends, it's the quality of Christmas.
Literally, for the past couple days, my life turned into a Christmas special. A really bizarre, non-traditional Christmas special.
Including the requisite Christmas miracle! Santa was nice and gave me two whole entire foreigners! And the two foreigners were nice and showed me where the Starbucks is. Naturally I walked past it like, 20 times on Sunday.
Because it was Christmas (and because the two foreigners knew one of the choir singers) we went to the one church in my area. Since it's the only church around it's got a lot of pressure to accommodate all the different sects of Christianity, so the church ended up looking like the mixed mutt of the family: a little bit Catholic, a little bit Protestant, and a little bit Gothic among others.
Because it was Christmas (and because the two foreigners knew one of the choir singers) we went to the one church in my area. Since it's the only church around it's got a lot of pressure to accommodate all the different sects of Christianity, so the church ended up looking like the mixed mutt of the family: a little bit Catholic, a little bit Protestant, and a little bit Gothic among others.
We only stayed for half an hour because it was all in Chinese and the singing didn't look like it was gonna start anytime soon. Naturally it did start once we left our seat and were almost out the door.
What's interesting is that no matter where I go in China, as a foreigner I'll always get seperate attention. When the three of us walked into that church people were scrambling over each other to get a good look at us, whipping out their cell phones, snapping pictures, really not even bothering to be discreet.
And even though the whole church was actually quite packed the ushers went to such great extremes as to get into the pews and push people out of the way just so we could have a spot in the front. We ended up sitting near the back though, it's a little less distracting that way.
This day is for Baby Jesus. Not us.
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