Feels Like Christmas...Well, Sort Of

The Christmas season in Shanghai unofficially began ages ago, pretty much right after the National Holiday at the beginning of October.  With only a minimal Chinese interest in Halloween and no break for Thanksgiving, China spends virtually two and a half months preparing for the Christmas season.  For weeks now, the Starbucks experience has included red-themed Christmas decorations and coffee cups, and muzak versions of "Little Drummer Boy" and other slightly less annoying Christmas songs.  Nanjing Road, one of the main drags in downtown Shanghai, is replete with snowflake ornaments, and has been so since the middle of October.  For such a profoundly secular society, one with its own, lunar New Year's celebration in February, the holiday season sure has a visible and prolonged presence in everyday life (see pictures below, all taken in a one block radius of my office building).

Tomorrow is my office holiday party.  It's casino themed, which means it'll likely feel more like a bar mitzvah party than an office party.  That said, I have no problem with gambling, particularly the kind with no prospect of losing money, so I'm not complaining. It also starts at 2pm, which means, assuming there is alcohol served, that it'll likely feel more like my bar mitzvah party (thrown at the Tau Epsilon Phi off-campus fraternity house when I was 22) than any normal bar mitzvah party. The Chinese colleagues whom I sit near have prepared a song, to the tune of a popular Chinese pop song that can be heard here.  The lyrics have been rewritten, to pertain to our work and colleagues, and I translated them into English so the few non-Chinese speakers will know what we're singing about.  Oh, right, that's the other thing... I'll be singing it with them.  Should be just about as ridiculous as it sounds.  If there's a video (I'm hoping there won't be), I'll put it up here.

Christmas time in Shanghai: putting a whole new meaning to the phrase "season's greetings" (in that it lasts literally an entire season).