Our man in Hong Kong compares and contrasts the festive seasons of his faraway position in the world, and of humble Nottingham...
I’m often asked what it’s like spending Christmas in another country, especially one where Christianity is hardly the leading faith. Well, with flashbacks to the patent horrors of shopping at Victoria Centre, I can report that it certainly doesn’t get any better and, if anything, has helped considerably in weaning the seasonal madness well out of me. Nowadays, I’m generally commercial-Christmas-clean.
You see, here it involves a frenetic dash in which maximum effort and dosh are expended on procuring unimaginable tat which the intended recipients neither need nor want. ‘What!’ I hear your wonderment: ‘Just like we do in UK then?!’ And, indeed, it is so – a vast trading exercise (honesty here, at least) in which the nativity and the true meaning of Christmas are treated with scant regard if at all, as if Christmas itself becomes the pantomime. Who needs Baby Jesus and mangers anyway?
With Hong Kong being a very mercantile sort of place, this glut-fest is not restricted to Crimbo, particularly since our dear mainland cousins have come into money and properly learnt how to waste it. All year, ravenous hordes rush the border wheeling enormous suitcases ready to cram with high-end cosmetics, confectionary and baby formula. Yes, baby formula! A much-prized and very nickable commodity kept well behind the counter, just in case. It’s an amusing shelf-mate viewed alongside stuff we ourselves might fancy a go at, like Veuve Clicquot or a respectable Moet, say. Clearly supermarket security has it covered.
The benefit of this constant influx is that we’re not treated to the same level of seasonal overkill as UK – it’s late November before the painfully familiar twangs of Frosty the Snowman or Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree pervade the supermarket aisles. Of course, attempting to emulate the UK’s obesity crisis, the Chinese redouble efforts at Christmas with walls of imported European cookie and chocolate tins, strategically stacked exactly as Asda or Tesco do – you see, it really is the same. Escape? Fat chance!
Even our bus driver has taken to playing a CD featuring several versions of Jingle Bells back-to-back. It’s excruciating. I feel quite embarrassed but, looking around, the locals seem to bear the assault with far better stoicism than I, as if such horror should be endured in support of our foreigner’s weird foibles. I know it’s difficult, with so much inflicted on these good people in the past: missionaries, colonialism, syphilis, and now this. Chinese water torture? If only they knew. There’s a track which sounds like Topo Gigio having his gonads squeezed, followed by a crooner, then an odd electronic version redolent of Kraftwerk; I blame the missionaries for this, the song, that is - not Kraftwerk. On the bright side, however, it’s possible to go all winter without suffering Christmas Slade, Wizard or Wham hits, and that works wonders for seasonal stress disorder.
A plus here is that we lack the post-Christmas blues brought on by diet and holiday ads, belt-tightening, winter and that awfully long wait until Easter. Indeed, no time for that business as there’s yet more to celebrate. By an amazing sleight of hand, the Chinese do it so well, all Santa and snowman decorations morph into fortunate fuks and clever couplets as we lurch into Chinese New Year. And then the festivals come thick and fast: grave-sweeping, Easter, Labour Day, Buddha’s birthday and dragon boats (so much festive consumption, it’s amazing that any of them float at all.) This east-meets-west lark is great, eight more holidays before May-end; you can see why many folks like working here.
Our Christmas shopping venues are worth a mention too, if only for being vast in both scale and quantity. In Nottingham terms, imagine that all regional areas such as Arnold, Basford or Beeston had at least one plaza equal in size to Victoria Centre. And of course they’re all entirely faceless, full of expensive designer crap of which the list is ever nauseous; but our international visitors seem to need it. Fortunately, we also have smaller malls, easier to get around and with a more traditional line of shops.
The big global downer to all this of course is the festive waste, we’ve all seen it: unwanted goods, unfinished food, unrecyclable packaging and display material which, no matter whether you feel pride, shame or indifference, end up in landfill or incineration spewing countless carcinogens into the air we breathe. Oh yes, Ho! Ho! Ho! Looks like Christmas’ll get us one way or another. Maybe not such a Fairy Tale Christmas after all, could be a proper Scary one though…
We have a favour to ask
LeftLion is Nottingham’s meeting point for information about what’s going on in our city, from the established organisations to the grassroots. We want to keep what we do free to all to access, but increasingly we are relying on revenue from our readers to continue. Can you spare a few quid each month to support us?
