The true meaning of Christmas, while being a hyper-cliché in Western cultures, is genuinely foreign to the Chinese people. I can say this with titanium-grade certainty because these words are being proffered by one seriously disillusioned Santa Claus.
Allow me to zoom out a bit and provide you, the weary holiday reader, some context. My Chinese friend Amy (a super-classy lady that runs her own juvenile English school here in LianYunGang and who’s also dating another foreign teacher here at the HuaiHai Institute of Technology) asked for foreign volunteers to come to a Christmas party at a local Kindergarten. “The more the better,” Amy said. And while I weighed the invitation, I was forced to consider the zealous generosity that Amy had shown to me and the other foreign teachers since I’ve been here. Also, I realized that my attendance at this party, while being a nice favor to Amy on the one hand, might make this Christmas more memorable for the children. Because—at the end of the day—you do it for the children.
Now, to make one thing perfectly clear: I don’t work with children on a daily basis. Some of my colleagues here in China have prior experience outside of the University setting; they’ve taught young’uns at home or abroad. My CV is relatively thin when it comes to early education, though. I suppose the psychology of dealing with the younger crowd is much more straightforward. I can wrap my head around that—no problem.
But the thing that a naïve University teacher fails to realize is this: the kids aren’t the problem; it’s the parents. I’ll get to this point in a moment.
Back to the so-called party. I was joined by Phil, Amy’s boyfriend and a colleague of mine at the University. We met Amy as she was closing up her school on Thursday night. En route to the party, Amy asked me if I would like to be Santa Claus. “Well, Amy…,” I said, “that’s a very enticing offer. But I’m not not exactly what you would call ‘jolly,’ nor do I have the…(cough, gesture towards my stomach) appropriate physique.” I was confident that Phil would be filling out the big red suit anyhow. He had agreed beforehand—I was witness to this. But then Amy informed me that she had extra Santa outfits. Phil’s eyes lit up when he heard this. “Now listen Rory,” Phil started in his heavy Dublin accent, “if I’m gonna be makin’ an arse outta meself yer gonna be there beside me. No two ways about it.” Ah shit.
I could feel my stomach churn in anticipation for one of the most humiliating ordeals of the year, let alone the decade. I was soon to discover that the absolute chaos of the situation would override any concerns I had about looking silly.
After arriving at the school I was led to a small closet, and Amy introduced me to the school’s headmaster. She gave me sparse instructions. “If the kids hand you a red or green ticket, then you give them a present from the bag,” she said. Pretty straight forward. When I exited the small utility closet that the school had set aside as “Santa’s Workshop,” wherein I donned the suit and loaded up Santa’s bag full of toys, the throng of people outside was enough to derail even the most stalwart of Ol’ Saint Nicks. I can’t tell you the exact number of kids that attend this Kindergarten; but judging by the amount of people crowding the halls and shoving past one another, I would estimate that anywhere between 500 and 50,000 kids attend this school.
Very soon I was caught up in the whirlwind of a commercially-driven farce of a holiday celebration; this was complete with a weak and unenthusiastic facsimile of Father Christmas, who was doling out cheap gifts to an un-appreciative crowd of youngsters. Sound familiar? Believe it or not, this happens in China too.
I was quickly surrounded on all sides by clamoring children, and if I failed to immediately take their tickets and exchange them for a gift then the parents wouldn’t hesitate to intervene. Like I said before, they’re by far the worst. I was besieged by pushy and insistent parents, some of them having the gall to tug on my sleeves and pry their hands into the bag. I had to lay down some Santa boundaries. I looked round for Phil in the hopes that we could make a united front. He was being swept in the other direction by the crowd, and I soon lost sight of him. On my own and faced with the mob, I tried to maintain a steady pace of gift dispensing and cheer spreading. I did my best rendition of the voice; I waved to the kids; I pretended to ignore the unintelligible shouts coming from parents who were apparently unsatisfied with the gift that I had given their child. There were moments where I very nearly lost my composure. I distinctly remember saying, more than once, to a sea of completely deaf ears that, “Hey! It’s about giving, not taking!”
And then after another hand tried to force its way into my bag, “Cut that out! That’s not Christmas, dammit!”
All in all, I believe that I was made to be less of a fool than some of these parents. Perhaps the school should’ve equipped their would-be Santas with riot gear instead of polyester bags filled with cheap plastic toys. But as fervent as I was in imposing the cheery and charitable spirit of the holidays, sometimes quite forcefully, the Chinese still understand very little about Christmas, Santa Claus, and the whole scene really. What mattered most for the school, in the end, was having a white face behind that fake white beard.
Trying as it was for me, my Welsh friend Michael had a worse time of it…somehow. He showed up a bit later on, and in a courageous act of selflessness he donned a Santa suit to provide some late-inning relief. He was bright as a supernova at first, throwing himself into the role with aplomb and cheer to spare. But then he made a fatal mistake when he knelt down to hand out gifts to some forlorn-looking tots. The resulting scramble for the open bag nearly trampled seven kids and knocked over a fully-articulated Christmas tree. It was a sad moment for Santa impersonators everywhere.
Rory Keane is an American-born teacher and writer who has logged nearly two years in China, and is working on another year-long stint in the Middle Kingdom. He writes about travel, sociopolitical issues, health, entertainment, and culture, among other topics.
