bright (and belated) christmas

We wore winter coats at Christmas Eve dinner and would have kept our gloves on too if they were at all compatible with chopsticks. The entire restaurant looked ready for a winter outing, except that instead of heading out to build a snowman we were eating a meal.

That’s winter in Chengdu for you – the weather isn’t just an outdoors thing. Because of the one-two punch of appreciating the healthy properties of “fresh” air while also believing that heating is detrimental to your health, people here leave their doors and windows open. Personally, I think having your extremities go numb while sitting in the living room is bad for your health, but don’t tell that to our neighbors. In spite of temps in the low 40s they have their doors and windows open. They also have animal carcasses hanging on their laundry lines but that appears unrelated to the season.

Opening doors and windows doesn’t waste energy or inflate heating bills because people here just don’t use heat. I talked to a university student who told me that university dorms in Chengdu are all without heating, including hers. In the north, where it gets even colder, people have long depended on radiators to stay warm, but in the south they are very limited. She told me that she is allowed to use a space heater in her room during the day but at night it must be turned off. The solution: sleeping under three quilts and lots of clothes.

This makes it easy to understand why people in Chengdu wear the same clothes inside as they do out of doors. If you dress for an afternoon of sledding, but sit down to watch TV instead, then having the windows open to the January breeze just might work.

Mufflers, earmuffs and sleeveless mittens are also living a long, happy life in China and I see at least one person a day studiously clip-clapping away on their office keyboard in fingerless gloves.  Of course not everyone wears head-to-toe winter gear. There are women who run around in heels and short skirts. But before you attribute this to diehard elegance I offer up the following anecdote, which also serves as a reminder that my Christmas in Chengdu is just another day in China.

While we were walking to the restaurant on Christmas Eve, a well-dressed woman in a skirt and heels whizzed past on a motor scooter with a similarly well-dressed friend sitting on the back. They were moving at a good clip when they passed, and as they did the driver huskily worked up some phlegm  and spit it off to the side. As she did, her passenger ducked behind her and then returned to chatting as if nothing had happened.

You get that a lot here. Both the spitting and the seeing things that make you rack your brain for any thought you’d ever previously given to something like that happening. Usually, there are none. For example: eating clavicles. Never thought of that before, but after seeing this sign on the way home from dinner I thought about it for at least five minutes.

And an earlier Christmas Eve example: while we were eating dinner a man walked into the restaurant holding a pair of very worn slippers. He wasn’t there to eat. Instead, he was looking for anyone who might want to have their shoes shined while they ate. Surprisingly, he found a woman who was more than happy to let him take her high-heeled ski boots outside and shine them. As he worked, she wore his frazzled slippers and continued on with her meal.

This December I didn’t meet any locals who celebrated a religious Christmas, but there were a lot of businesses that celebrated their own versions of Christmas. Department stores hung Christmas lights at their entrances, karaoke places put up Christmas trees with Budweiser ornaments, and some of the smaller Mom and Pop shops earnestly tried to capture the spirit of the season but instead ended up writing things like “menny chismas” on their windows instead. No complaints here… in southwestern China anything remotely resembling Christmas décor is good enough for me.

Apparently, young people have also started celebrating the holiday. We’ve heard that they go out for meals with friends, hit the bars afterwards, and then close out the night by running around public squares hitting each other with inflatable sticks. This practice had become so popular that the same university student whose dorm room goes unheated told me that her school now forbids students from participating in these sorts of celebrations as injuries have increased over the years.

Aside from hitting strangers with inflatable sticks, Christmas in Chengdu looks a lot like Christmas in Chicago. This is mainly because we don’t go anywhere on Christmas Day. Instead we sit by our tree opening presents, eating heaps of teeth-rotting candy before breakfast, and listening to so much Christmas music that Shi-wen’s head nearly explodes.

This year China also gave us a gift. It made my eyes well up because the gift was a bright blue sky that burned my eyes to look at it. Chengdu’s never-ending parade of grey rainy days has turned us both into cave people who can see in the dark, but on Christmas day we had blue in the sky and shadows on the ground. There was also a woman in two-piece patterned fleece pajamas walking around the neighborhood. But I digress.

Even though our pajama-clad neighbors have almost certainly never sent a letter to the North Pole, I'm pretty sure Santa came to Chengdu anyway. Most nights the click-clacking of mahjiang tiles, the quick-fire bursts of unintelligible Chinese chatter, and the sounds of several people an hour hacking up a lung fight their way into our living room. But on Christmas Eve the mahjiang club’s windows were unexpectedly dark and the clatter was gone. 

For once it was quiet in Chengdu. And for me, this moment was as much proof that Santa exists as anything.