I'll Be Home(sick) For Christmas...

Although it really didn’t feel like Christmas over here, what with palm trees outside my window and my entire family on the other side of the planet, I did my best to recreate a Christmas dinner with a few of my friends on Christmas Day. What had started as a couple of traditional treats with our good friend and regular dinner guest Benson somehow snowballed into a mini Christmas party with six people and a full seven-course Christmas dinner crammed into our tiny dorm room. Despite a brief case of “what the ^&$*!&@ was I thinking,” it all fell quite neatly into place, and for a few fleeting hours I felt the familiar warmth of a Western Christmas (and my Chinese friends got a taste of a foreign Christmas).

Bridget had already received a care package this month from her obliging (and obviously very well-organized) parents, equipped with Christmas decorations, napkins, a pair of crackers, a placemat, a tea towel, and gifts for both of us, and our friend Paul had given us a tiny silver tinsel Christmas tree strung with blue lights, so we were actually fairly well prepared. When we cleared all the books and junk off the homework desk at the front of the room and set the tree on it with all the gifts underneath, it actually looked pretty festive in here.

We spent the day cleaning our apartment and rushing around Beibei buying as many traditional Christmas foods as we could. In the end we had a formidable buffet spread around our little tree, and the only think I had to cook was a pot of mulled wine (accomplished, of course, with my trusty rice cooker). We had apples (苹果, píng guǒ), oranges (橘子, júzi), sesame candies, chestnuts (栗子, lìzi) and roasted yams (红薯, hóng shǔ) procured from various street vendors; smoked walnuts (核桃, hé tao), roasted almonds (杏仁, xìng rén), imported Scottish shortbread, imported Swiss Miss hot chocolate and cheapo Changyu red wine from the supermarket; Korean chocolate covered almonds from the import store; and some raspberry Jell-o, European chocolate-topped digestive cookies and Scottish clotted cream fudge sent all the way from Calgary by Bridget’s awesome parents. In China, if you don’t serve meat to your guests, you run the risk of looking like you’re too cheap to feed them properly, and I knew some of our guests were meat enthusiasts, so without a turkey in sight we opted for takeout kung pao chicken (宫保鸡丁, gōng bǎo jī dīng) and sweet and sour pork (糖醋肉, táng cù ròu) with rice (米饭, mǐ fàn) from the canteen a block from our dorm.

Of course, about half an hour before our guests were expected to show up, I realized I’d misplaced my corkscrew. I ran to a couple of the campus convenience stores, which sell everything from socks and housewares to farm-fresh eggs and booze, and neither of them had a corkscrew they’d sell, although both offered to open the bottle for me if I brought it over. Defeated, I ran back to my dorm and returned with my wine to the nearest store, an incredibly grubby and dishevelled little collection of sparingly stocked shelves in a shop whose function appears to be completely dominated by the mah-jong table in the back. After announcing my presence several times, someone eventually heard me over the chatter and gossip, and four or five older men and women abandoned their game to crowd around and watch the grinning shopkeeper haul out the store corkscrew and open the foreigner’s wine.

Somehow, we got the food, drinks and apartment ready in time. We’d found Santa hats for sale at the supermarket and bought enough for everyone, so as soon as our friends arrived we slapped a hat on them. I had some extra cloves on hand from the mulled wine (which only requires two or three cloves, maximum), so I set them out on the coffee table with some tiny baby mandarins and taught everyone to make pomanders. It ended up being a really nice icebreaker, as well as a fun little cultural detail for my Chinese friends. We stabbed cloves into oranges and chatted a bit, discussing school, Christmas traditions, and plans for spring festival, and then we all migrated to the buffet. It was a good thing we thought to buy meat – it was the only thing on the table that got finished. Benson and Xu Bixi had arrived with a massive cake, and when we were all too full to look at the buffet anymore they forced a big slice on everyone. There’s still nearly half a cake sitting in our fridge right now. I’m scared to look at it.

We spent the rest of the night sitting around, picking at the buffet, making pomanders and chatting. I’d found Toblerones for a reasonable price at the import store and gave one to everyone. I also had a special gift for Bixi. In China, nearly everyone under the age of 30 has studied English, and most of them have an English name, as well, which they either pick themselves or are given by an English teacher. Bixi could never decide on one and was never given one by a teacher, so she was excited when I promised her a name for Christmas. After a few hours scanning lists on baby name sites, I eventually went with my original idea – Bijou – which, although it’s actually French and not English, seemed to suit her the most and sounded closest to her Chinese name. She loved it, and so did everyone else. Although I’ll probably just keep calling her Bixi out of habit.

Chinese word of the day:

晚会
wǎn huì
(Evening) party