Merry Christmas from Haerbin

Merry Christmas to all our friends and family. We miss you all and look forward to seeing you in the coming weeks. We are a day ahead of you, one of the perks living in Asia. Not sure how Santa manages the different time zones, but he did manage to find us buried in amongst 1.3 billion Chinese. What a guy!




We spent a quiet Christmas morning with a few hundred kindergarten students. Could not have been a more special moment. Brian and I had a whole class to ourselves. Thirty 4-5 year olds with a whole lot of energy. We played, we coloured and we smiled a lot.

This little girl is creating a Christmas card for us, writing the whole thing in English. Truly amazing. Her handwriting was better than 90% of North American doctors and imminently more readable than my scribble.

The young of China have discovered Christmas in a big way. The entire school was decorated with Christmas trees, Santas and brilliantly coloured garland. There was a life size Santa at the entrance to the school beside a five foot, fully decorated tree. When talking about this phenomena with our grad students, they called Christmas a good excuse to get together with friends and have a party. As good a reason to celebrate Christmas as any. They have created a tradition of giving beautifully wrapped apples to friends on Christmas Eve. The pronunciation of Chinese for apple is close to the pronunciation for Christmas Eve so it seemed appropriate.

Massive gift giving has not caught on yet, but I am sure it will not be far behind. Valentines Day was recently embraced and has become one of their bigger consumer spending days. The commerializaion of many Chinese holidays is also becoming a problem. During the Fall Festival, they have a tradition of giving Moon Cakes. These are little sweet cakes specially made for the holidays and are given as gifts to friends and family. The government had to pass legislation which stated that the packaging of the moon cakes could not cost more than the acutal cost of the moon cakes to prevent people from spending too much money. A lesson for North America? Maybe.