By William Childress

We’re lucky, in Shanghai, to be in a city with so many foreigners that we can essentially experience the holidays as we would in our native land. But don’t get me wrong — we’re not exactly in an expatriate haven.

For now my day job, at a shady Chinese office, is pretty soul-crushing. Naturally any time away from it is welcome, and I also offset this horror by performing standup comedy in and around Shanghai. Most of my social circle is connected to the standup and improv scene here and those were the people with whom I spent Christmas. Saturday marked my last standup gig of the year, held at a bar on the slightly dodgy Yongfu Lu. Aside from a newer comic who bombed pretty hard, the show went over great and we had a fantastic crowd of expats and a few locals (85/15 split, which is normal). I was especially pleased with the turnout given the proximity to Christmas and, yes, there were China-themed Christmas jokes (the Naughty list being a censored search term on Baidu, stockings full of century eggs, things of that nature but funnier, I promise you). Standup has never felt like a job, but it still requires a lot of preparation and mental focus to pull off a good show, and with the gig out of the way we were free to sit back and relax a bit.

The hub of our group is Masse, a bar and restaurant where we hold weekly open mics and paid shows a few times a month. We’ve grown close with the husband-and-wife team behind the bar, and on Sunday the 23rd we collaborated on a day-long, wine-soaked Christmas movie marathon. After running through A Christmas Story and Elf, we sat down for a massive dinner of turkey, ham, and all the associated trimmings. Considering few of us at the dinner even had an oven in our apartment, much less one that would hold the gargantuan fowl laid before us, it was somewhat of a Christmas miracle. After laying waste to the spread we settled firmly into a meat coma and nodded through Bad Santa and Die Hard before dispersing to our respective domiciles.

On Christmas day I swapped gifts with my roommates, an American teacher/comedian and an Italian professor, and then we made our way to a friend’s house for a potluck dinner. It was one of those affairs where everyone is initially worried about a lack of food, only to find an overabundance of grub and spirits once everyone rocks up to the dinner. Russia, Korea, Italy, China, Australia, England, and the US were all represented in force. Russian salat, Italian gnocchi, meatballs, soup, shrimp and grits from the southern US, curry chicken wings, cakes, pies, Scotch, vodka, and wine all graced our table. The dinner was in keeping with the overall theme of the weekend: if we couldn’t go home for the holidays, we’d just bring a taste of home to China. Oh, and on a related note, if you bring hash brownies to a party, LABEL THEM. One girl went home panicked with more than visions of sugar plums dancing in her head.

Looking around me during that potluck and earlier at the dinner at Masse I realized that almost everyone I celebrated the holidays with last year had moved on. It’s a cliché of expat life, sure, but at some point it all rings true to us – that ebb and flow and friends arriving and departing is simply inevitable. I touched on my job situation before, but to keep a long story short I had a very small window in which to decide whether to leave China or dig in for the long haul. There are better places to practice architecture, there are better places to perform standup, but no other place has the combination of friends and opportunities that I’ve found in Shanghai. That never rang truer than it did over the holidays. The people around me were my family and I had to enjoy them while they were there. These were the people who will support me and I, in turn, will support them. I feel like I’ve planted some roots here, but I am also well aware that things could change any day. I know that I could easily be the one missing from the party this time next year. So until then, here’s to now.

Merry Christmas.

William is an architect and standup comedian living in Shanghai. Follow him at @heyitschili and check out Kung Fu Comedy for standup dates.

By Felix

Christmas in China. If there’s one topic that comes up often in conversations with relatives and friends about my life in the Middle Kingdom, that’s gotta be the one. How do I cope? How does it feel to be so far away from the family, in very un-Christmasy China?

I usually just shrug. Truth is, I never really was into the whole Christmas thing that much, as far as I can remember. And don’t expect some kind of angsty emo-kid rant or endless diatribe about the lost traditions and over-commercialism here. Sure, I enjoy the days off, and the big family party, but couldn’t care less for everything else: Jesus, the bland Christmas food, giving or receiving presents (something I actually love doing, but hate being socially pressured into), the horrible Christmas songs that you hear over and over and over in every shopping area from Halloween onwards… moving to Asia wasn’t that bad in that regard. I was losing the days off and the possibility to attend the family reunion, but not being eye- and ear-raped by unwanted, saturated and tacky advertisement every time I hit a supermarket was well worth it.

And after five straight Christmases here, I feel the same way as I did in 2008: nothing much. Life goes on. But the expat story I want to share with you isn’t mine, but a friend’s.

Her name is Fariba, and she hails from Iran.

Now, the latter is not just an anecdotal detail, as it shapes pretty much the story of one of the most interesting encounters I have ever had in the past year. As a small-city laowai, I’m used to sparse interactions with the odd foreigner, nearly always North American, or at the very least, Western European; in short, people who share a similar cultural background with me. As such, conversations tend to be the same, but with Fariba, I knew right away it wouldn’t be the case.

She was happy to talk to an English-speaker, her Chinese being nearly nonexistent after only three weeks in the country, and I was glad to hear her perspective and stories about China seen through the eyes of a non-Western expatriate. Even though she was in her late-20s, well educated (Master’s degree in engineering, fluency in English and a good smattering of French) and had many international friends, it was the first time she had ever left Iran. Apprehensive she was upon learning she’d be sent by herself to a small industrial town, but also hungry for the experience. The things she was looking forward to the most? Not having to wear the hijab was number one; number two, finally getting to taste pork. The latter was a bit of an underwhelming experience, and I couldn’t help but crack up laughing hearing her story, picturing herself with a Chinese coworker munching on a plate of pig rectums rather than a juicy ham or some perfectly fried bacon as her very first non-halal experience. Her stories were refreshing, partly because of her sweet naiveté, and also because her cultural shock was much different than the ones I have heard about a million times before — not the kind of stuff you usually encounter in old-grumpy-white-men-dominated expat haunts!

But where is Christmas in that story? I’m coming to it: as we were walking down the aisles of a supermarket to get some goodies, her large and beautiful Persian eyes lit up, she blurted, “Wow, I can’t believe it, there is so much Christmas spirit here! It’s wonderful!” I smiled at what I think was unsubtle sarcasm, but then realized she was dead serious. She was actually marveling at the somewhat minimalistic decorations, the undersized plastic tree, and the pointy red hats worn by the bored cashiers, even pulling me by the arm from time to time to point out something that really grabbed her attention. “Look at that! So cool!” or “They make special chocolate for Christmas?”

So while the vast majority of foreigners I know or have known try their hardest to get the most out of their Christmases with their limited resources — organizing potlucks with other expatriates, planning Christmas lessons, clumsily decorating their unheated apartments with cardboard from the corner store, having extended Skype sessions with family at ungodly hours — yet still feel a burst of homesickness as the 25th rolls around, Fariba was actually embracing what was her first Christmas experience ever. How little, fake and “Chinese” everything was, it didn’t matter at all. She could finally experience and see with her own eyes what she could only get from movies and stories told by her Western friends in Isfahan or Tehran.

For her, Christmas will always be China. The two concepts are inextricably linked from now on.

Felix is an avid cyclist and death metal fan currently living and working in Wuxi, Jiangsu province. He is also the artist of Laowai Comics. (Ed’s note: “Fariba” is an alias.)

BJC’s An Expat Christmas series will roll on through the week. In a place where Christmas is an “event” and not part of the culture, it can be cancelled as easily as it is arranged, as Chris Clayman recently found out at his school in Lincang, Yunnan province.

By Chris Clayman

For religious folk, shut-ins, and fans of Home Alone, a one-man Christmas sounds nice enough. It’s really touching how Kevin McAllister takes the time to set up a Christmas tree when no one is around to see his work. But the rest of us likely need others to validate these strange traditions. Does Christmas have meaning when you are the only one celebrating?

My fellow teachers in our isolated Yunnan school are not true holiday comrades; “Christmas” in Ximu means shaokao and overpriced apples. I obviously welcome any Yuletide wishes! But it works only as formality, like saying “good show!” to the violin virtuoso after his performance: one sees the product and the other sees the process, the endless hours of repetition in practice. My co-teachers can’t recall the Christmas mornings of their childhood, their sleepwalk through years of awkward family dinners, the mistletoe in the dorm hallway waiting for a willing couple. In this town, the holiday only exists because I exist.

The sort of material fascination with holiday culture found in China’s cities never made its way to the countryside. I guess I could walk outside drunkenly screaming shengdan kuaile, but most people would take my ramblings only as a reminder that yes, that weird Western holiday happens to be today. So that special festive feeling is confined to my teacher’s dorm: a Santa poster and a Charlie Brown-sized Christmas tree, covered in student-made ornaments. When Skyping with friends and family back home, I’ve made sure to place these things within view, giving off the illusion of globe-spanning Christmas cheer.

Early on I realized that one of my roles as teacher is as the Official Envoy for Western Culture. It’s the only way to keep the Yule log burning, so to speak. So began the month-long challenge of teaching my first- and second-graders a few Christmas songs. Yesterday afternoon, with the rest of the school looking on, the students put on their cardboard Santa hats and gave their interpretations of “Jingle Bells” and “Deck the Halls.” Between songs, two students took out the Charlie Brown tree, stepped in front of the choir, and hung stockings on the branches. In teaching traditions to six- and seven-year olds, sometimes you have to cut a few corners.

The kids held hands and sang “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” maybe the only song they could fully understand. I’m no slouch in Chinese, but I’d like to see you try and explain the lines “boughs of holly” and “bells on bobtails ring” to your EFL students. Actually, I’d like to see you explain them to any adult. Their pageant was moving in the way most children’s choirs move. The kids screamed each syllable, attracting the attention of some of the elderly who were wandering around the school. To me, the spirit of Christmas continues in the busted vocal chords of my students.

When Anthony asked me to write about my Christmas experience in rural Yunnan, I made an ill-advised crack about BJ Cream’s exhaustive car accident coverage. But someone died today, and Christmas is to blame.

I’ll be brief. My principal was suspiciously absent during the pageant. At dinner, a car pulled up in front of the cafeteria. Everyone who stepped out of the car — our current principal and a few teachers — looked like they had aged a few years. Then I heard the story: while gathering food for the Christmas shaokao, Mr. Li, our school groundskeeper, hit and ran over our school’s former principal, a retired man from the nearest village. Under these circumstances, we effectively cancelled Christmas.

The shaokao planned for last night will have to wait until another day. My principal came to my door, shook my hand, and told me Merry Christmas. It’s just that sometimes there are more pressing concerns.

Chris teaches at Ximu Elementary near Lincang, Yunnan province. He keeps a sometimes-active Tumblr, My Own Private China, and tweets @chrisclayman.

It’s still Christmas in some parts of the world. BJC’s “An Expat Christmas” series continues, in which foreigners in China write about the holiday experience from their respective cities. Here, Justin Mitchell recalls one fretful Christmas in Shenzhen, and the people who made it all better.

By Justin Mitchell

I have spent enough Christmases in China that hearing “Mamacita, Donde Esta Santa Claus?” and the barking Jingle Bells dogs pumped at 110 amps in late October in a Shenzhen wet market no longer phases or even makes me wonder WTF?

Few have been especially memorable except one that I’ll call the Gift of the Magi.

It was a classic deep and dark December in Shenzhen – wuss weather compared to anything Beijing dishes out so coldly and cruelly, yet enough chill and attendant “fog” in the air that it felt like you could spoon chucks outta the muck and spit them out.

I was having a classic foreigner vs. local-downstairs-neighbor-and-property-agent clash as my circa 1993 “Flying Swallow” washing machine was leaking water directly into my aggrieved neighbor’s apartment. She spoke fluent English, which I initially thought was an advantage as my eight- or 10-word Chinese vocabulary doesn’t cut it even when it comes to reliable cab rides. But nooo… it backfired big time on me.

Attempts at negotiations led nowhere as I was “obviously” at fault because I flushed toilet paper instead of tossing it into a waste basket where it would become a cockroach and sanitation-free amusement park that the Atlanta Center for Disease Control would’ve killed to study.

Though it was obvious to me that bad plumbing in the kitchen where the washing machine churning out its aqua evil was the culprit, all Chinese eyes were on the toilet paper disposal. Nearly 2,000 kuai in compensation to the neighbor became as useless as the used TP, and the situation escalated to the point that she began calling me at 5:30 am to complain about a load of wash I’d done at 8 pm the previous night.

My fuse blew and I responded with what I thought were witty, culturally cutting text messages. “I curse you for eight generations!” She threatened to sue. My pithy response was “Chinese law is bullshit. Like your tofu apartments. I am doing a load of laundry now so I won’t smell like a zhu tou (pig face) like you. Deal with it.”

She threatened more legal action and took steps to have me fired from my state-owned media group where I toiled as a “foreign expert polisher.” Not a small threat, actually, as there was precedent when former naughty laowais had suddenly had their contracts and visas cut loose for “disturbing the social order” following a bar fight that had nothing to do with their otherwise professional duties.

She informed me that she had saved all my rude messages that had hurt the feelings of Chinese people, most especially herself, and said she’d begun trying to contact my employer.

Enter the classic deus ex machina.

Through random circumstances I’d become friends with a notable Chinese female composer, pianist and conductor whose father was a well known, distinguished multilingual professor and editor of a respected Guangzhou university literary publication. I’d never met him, and my relationship with his daughter – who calls composers such as Tan Dun “little brother” due to being close classmates back in the day – was entirely chaste.

But we enjoyed one another’s company and a few days before Christmas I spilled out my house rent blues to her over dinner.

She offered to call my rabid neighbor and property agent as a mediator. She did so and then I learned she’d played the cultural card, plus an inventive twist of high fiction.

After establishing her academic/musical credentials with the neighbor she mentioned her father, whom she described as a “good friend” of mine, so good, in fact, that I had once offered to donate blood to him for a serious operation.

This time the bitch caved. She knew the father’s reputation and was stunned to hear that an evil, foul-mouthed, ass-wiping and flushing foreigner would do such a thing.

Well, maybe I would, but it never happened.

Nonetheless it came to pass on Christmas Day that the Magi appeared: my composer pal, a property agent, and some schmuck in a bad suit and company lanyard hanging from his neck. The schmuck left quickly, but the two women held up more than half the sky that day. I possess the hardware and plumbing skills of a half-wit dingo, but they were diligent.

The composer — originally from Guangzhou — had grown up in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution where she was both able to still play violin and study music, but had also learned basic skills that the American tool guy takes for granted.

They spent nearly seven hours calling in plumbers and doing their own calculations, squatting in my kitchen muck til finally the washing machine ran like the Flying Swallow it was meant to be, no muss, no fuss, no drainage.

I imagined my composer on a podium or sitting at a piano in formalwear as she labored under my sink and felt both ashamed and grateful. It was like watching the likes of Leonard Bernstein fixing my garbage disposal.

But I can think of no better Christmas present or past, here, there or anywhere.

God bless them, everyone.

BJC’s “An Expat Christmas” series continues, as Jocelyn Eikenburg shares her experience of gift-giving — and receiving — from one Christmas in Shanghai.

By Jocelyn Eikenburg

When you spend Christmas in China as an expat, it’s easy to feel a little forgotten by the holiday season. But in 2004, when I lived in Shanghai, I had just visited the Shanghai Marriage Bureau to register with my Chinese sweetheart, John — a man who I had spent the previous two Christmases with — so I considered myself somehow immune to that feeling of isolation. Or so I thought.

My employer gave me Christmas off. John also had no classes that day, and promised to take a break from his dissertation work — work that, for the weeks leading up to the holiday, meant lengthy trips to Hangzhou and exhausting late evenings typing away at his computer.

Since I always loved playing “Santa Claus” to John, who of course never grew up with stories of this jolly old man, I presented him with his gifts first — two wool turtleneck sweaters, one in royal blue and another in deep maroon. John beamed at them, and I couldn’t help but smile with pride, knowing I’d nailed the perfect gifts.

“So, what did ‘Santa Claus’ bring me for Christmas?” I asked John. By then, he already understood that “Santa Claus” was our little euphemism for the gifts we gave to one another.

His smile evaporated. “I’m sorry.”

My heart sank as I noticed that no other gifts, cards or bags sat under our tiny artificial tree in the corner. “You forgot?”

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. He never even celebrated Christmas until he met me, and even then, he usually left his gifts in plastic bags under the tree, sometimes even with the receipt. Plus, in late 2004, the pressure to finish the draft of his dissertation before Chinese New Year had probably distracted him so much he didn’t realize that this was, to his foreign wife, as important a time of year as guonian.

Yet I couldn’t think about any of that, not on a morning I had anticipated for weeks. Even a few pairs of socks — something he had been known to buy for me in past Christmases — would have cheered me. But the absence of any gift from my favorite “Santa Claus” only magnified the loneliness and isolation that can come from spending the holidays in a country where Christmas carols are often nothing more than great karaoke tunes. I hung my head and started to cry.

To John, though, my tears were a catalyst. “You wait here, I’m going to find something for you.” He jumped up, threw on his jeans and a sweater, and headed for the door.

A few hours later, a grinning John burst through the door with two plastic bags in hand. “Shengdan kuaile,” he said as he placed them in my hands.

Inside the first bag, I found several pairs of cotton socks in my favorite colors, including red and pink. But from the second, I pulled out a knit scarf and matching hat splashed in waves of brilliant apricot, creamy yellow, and a light toffee brown. Even the style, right down to the button on the brim of the hat, felt as unconventional as the clothes I wore outside the office. Only John could have known I would love this scarf and hat. That thought warmed me from head to toe, even in our drafty apartment, and turned a “forgotten Christmas” into something unforgettable.

Jocelyn writes Speaking of China, an award-winning blog about love, family and relationships in China.

BJC’s “An Expat Christmas” series continues, in which foreigners in China write about the holiday experience from their respective cities. If you’re in Changsha, look up our next contributor, who’s been finding Christmas cheer — and creating some of her own.

By Amanda Roberts

This is the third Christmas my husband and I have spent in Hunan, and we have worked on each one of them. The first two years we were teaching at schools that didn’t make any special to-do about Christmas, and they didn’t want to give us time off since a four-week break for Spring Festival was so close behind. This year we are working at a computer game company that’s also not giving time off. Because of this, what we’ve learned about Christmas in China is the same thing we learned about Halloween and Thanksgiving: holidays are what you make of them.

In America, Christmas isn’t just about presents: it permeates every facet of life. In China, there is only the materialistic aspect, and because of that — in Changsha, at least — very few places have any kind of “holiday cheer.”

Another hindrance to Christmas festivities in Changsha is the fact that many foreigners simply leave town. Changsha isn’t a tourist destination. If you live here, you can find a few fun things, but it’s not really worth the trip in just for a holiday. The weather is abhorrent. Winters are cold and wet — rainy, not snowy — and a gray gloom settles over the city that can last for months. I think last winter we went four months without seeing the sun. So the foreigners who can leave town usually do. The few who remain are usually working, so there aren’t many people left to gather for holiday fun.

Because of these reasons many people might give up on having any kind of Christmas fun here in the ‘sha and simply bunker down under an electric blanket and wait for spring to arrive.

But not all is hopeless. On Sunday, my husband and I hit the streets to find some Christmas.

We went to the ID Mall and were greeted by polar bears giving out hugs (ok, just guys in polar bear suits that actually looked a little more like wolves… but whatever, just go with it). There was a very large center display in the basement level which you could see even from floor five because the mall is open air to the top floor. For most of the day, there was a young lady in the middle of the display playing the harp. It was quite lovely. We were amazed when the young lady left and a very authentic Santa Claus came out! The Chinese people were simply ecstatic and rushed to get their picture taken with him (and most of these were older teenagers and adults, not little kids). That night, we went over to La Nova Mall to see the giant outdoor Christmas tree on display. There was a lighting ceremony for it last week, but it wasn’t advertised very well.

But for people who don’t want to wander through malls for a Christmas experience, there are always people who generate their own brand of celebration instead of waiting for things to happen. Several people like spending Christmas with their students, maybe buying a tree on Taobao and reading The Night Before Christmas or Skyping with folks back home so their pupils can see what a real American home decorated for the holidays looks like (students really love this). Hooligan’s Pub, the local expat watering hole, is always open, and many expats will gather there for fun and relaxation.

Seth and I will be wearing our Krampus shirts and subjecting our friends to a viewing of The Star Wars Holiday Special – the best worst holiday film ever made. This is actually what we would be doing if we were back in the States anyway, so Christmas is pretty much the same no matter where we are. Hopefully others can find a similar joy.

Amanda is an American living in Changsha. She blogs at Two Americans in China.

By Pete DeMola

I’m one of the few people I know who can probably recount all thirty of my Christmases without skipping a beat: I was born the day before the Big Day, and I have a twin brother.

As such, the two-day period has historically been conflated and has taken on a special significance characterized by a sense of the Other – a Bizarro World consisting of shuttered storefronts sighing under the weight of the Northeastern winter gloom and midnight church services and loving parents and the Little Sis making sure that the Big Two were always consistent in their borderline mediocrity as the Other Guy and I found ways to amuse ourselves.

Twenty-three of those years were spent identically. Apart from my first Christmas – one that was passed, in part, tucked into a stocking alongside the Other Guy (good one, parents) – they’ve all been the deadened hum of vehicles traveling over packed snow to visit relatives and ruminating over another year while fielding volleys of folksy questions from good-hearted simpletons like, “Gee whiz – I guess you get gypped every year on presents” and “Wow, what a Christmas for your parents!”

This will be my eighth Christmas abroad. And since I spent the first twenty-three of them traipsing around snowy suburban lots with the Other Guy stirring up holiday mischief in attempts to generate an antidote for the often-numbing sameness, I suppose that on some unconscious level, I’d prefer to be alone if I can’t be with him.

Life in China, however, has finally provided the sought-after cure to that historic two-dimensionality, namely for two reasons:

The country’s insular culture pushes expats to generate their own holiday traditions – we are all immigrants, after all, seeking to create new shared schematic experiences – and because the ephemeral nature of expat existence leads to a revolving cast of friends and networks that often shift from year-to-year, resulting in a variety of different celebrations depending on who you happen to be hanging with at the time.

Those twenty-three years of the blurred Big Two, then, have been replaced by unbelievable variety, a wide range of Christmas Day experiences that have run the gamut from the particularly Chinese (starting a new job as a business reporter) to joyous (the year when a multinational rainbow coalition of expats assembled at a Mexican restaurant before getting tanked at a Japanese sake joint) to subdued, like last year’s session of scotch swirling with a German businessman at a dimly-lit café in a southwestern provincial backwater.

This will be my first Merry Birthday in Hong Kong, a city that, unlike the mainland, actually seriously observes the holiday – that is to say, it means a hell of a lot more to locals than a mere cynical vehicle for marketing that is also a reminder of the paradoxes of modern-day China, a desire to fit in yet shun foreign influence: all cheap advertising copy and gaudy decorations and butchered traditions and the idiotic donning of pointy Santa hats and antlers outfitted with blinking LED lights.

It’s made the leap from an insular tradition to one that’s been incorporated into the mainstream. Here in the former British colony, the traditionalism is here if you want it – and so are the submerged pockets of uniqueness.

With over 150 years of practice, the holiday’s staid British customs are cemented into the Hong Kong psyche: brandy-laced pudding, roasted turkey dinners, Dickensian plays and the singing of hymns all run deep alongside the threads taken from the SAR’s increasingly-dynamic grab bag of nationalities – like the hallowed Nochebuena from the fun-loving (and devoutly Catholic) Filipinos, for example, or the local tradition of taking in the holiday lights while reveling at the Causeway Bay, and Tsim Sha Tsui countdowns after blowing five figures on an ostentatious feast before hopping on a plane to a glamorous holiday destination.

The kids even had a riot one year, an act of Yuletide cheer in 1981 that unfortunately didn’t become a recurring tradition.

While my experiences during the Big Two will undoubtedly again be a product of ephemeral circumstance – like singing folk songs with my Filipino shopkeeper pals under the palms, for example – the city’s distinctive culture will come into play, too – namely that of making money to survive in this cutthroat hotpot of ultra-competitiveness: the SAR’s defining characteristic.

Nonetheless, I will wish that the Other Guy – that burly bearded figure who works up in the Arctic Circle doing what it is that he does in his Kerouac Life – was here to add that element of sameness.

Pete DeMola is a writer and creative consultant in Hong Kong. He tweets at @pmdemola.

Beijing Cream’s “An Expat Christmas” series continues, in which foreigners in China write about the holiday experience from their respective cities. Our second of two stories from Beijing comes via Allison Reibel, about a tree rooted in the Christmas spirit no matter how much things around it might change.

By Allison Reibel

I usually avoid IKEA. The abundance of foldable furniture and storage containers makes me see the transience of my own life in China. But Christmas moves us to do crazy things, and I had my heart set on a laptop stand for my roommate, who is Chinese and won’t likely be leaving the country anytime soon. I imagined her reclining on the couch, streaming a movie with maximum comfort, saying to herself, “The foreigners are right! Christmas is fucking great!”

In line for my pre-shopping Swedish meatballs, however, I realized my ICBC bank card wasn’t in my wallet. I ran home to look for it, then to the supermarket to ask if I’d left it. It seemed to have disappeared into Beijing’s icy air. I brought my passport to the bank and was told I could pick up a new card in seven days: December 25. “But that’s Christmas!” I told the teller, and she giggled a little. She and her English-speaking coworker called in for backup. “No card, no money,” he said.

I had about 600 RMB at home, which would have been more than enough any other time of year. But two days later, I was picking up my mom at the airport, who hadn’t brought cash in anticipation that I’d be able to loan her some. I felt bad ruining the plan and forcing us both to pull out our foreign credit cards. But she was too excited to care, and didn’t seem to mind that there would be nothing under the tree for her – or, for that matter, anyone.

The crooked little tree is the one sign of Christmas in our apartment. It was passed down from another English teacher who left the country when his contract ended in September. He was happy to be rid of it and I was happy to have it. Christmas is a time when life in Beijing feels especially transitory. No one wants to buy decorations because no one believes they’ll be staying much longer anyway, and an extra gift may just mean an extra suitcase. But the tree knows it has a job to do. It reminds us every day that Christmas is coming. And its beauty is radiant enough for my roommate to snap Weibo-bound iPhone pictures.

We’ll have Peking Duck instead of turkey and sweet doujiang in place of eggnog. We’re spending Christmas eve in Xi’an, rushing away from the Jingle Bells of the hostel lobby and toward the city’s Great Mosque. And on Wednesday, we’ll be at the Summer Palace. But strangely, the China holiday experience doesn’t feel too strange. As for December 25, I’ve only written one note of reminder: “Christmas!”

(And, of course, “Pick up bank card.” There’s a story here about how my colleagues gave me bundles of pink hundred-kuai bills at our office Christmas party, but I’ll save it for another time in fear that their generosity is too obvious a symbol of the holiday spirit.)

And sometime after New Year’s, when its exotic charm has worn off for my roommate, I will dismantle the little tree. I will shove it back into its box and begin the search for its new home. A traveler must know how to find Christmas wherever you find yourself. And an English teacher’s Christmas tree must always be ready to move on. Christmas isn’t about the presents; it isn’t even about the cookies. It’s about sharing what you have, hugging those you love (or at least those you like, if the ones you love are out of reach), and bracing yourself for whatever comes next.

Allison is a writer and editor in Beijing who blogs at Early Allison Dynasty. You can reach her at @AlllisonR.