A friend of mine just asked if a Chinese looking Santa would be creepy. In this post, I have a picture of a Chinese Santa.









The differences that I see are:

1. His skin is a little bit darker
2. Chinese beard style as seen in pictures of gods
3. Sash around him with some Chinese Characters on him.
4. Not as fat as the usual American Santa Claus
5. Not as tall, but has a more powerful build.
   

My thought is he is cute.

A long time ago while I was in college I helped put together a booth for Monitors for Samsung, and they had an Asian Uncle Sam. The Koreans loved it. My coworkers thought it a bit strange :-) I kept a poster of it for many years, but I can no longer find it (to many moves).

Labels: Chinese Christmas

Interesting site I was poking around on has a great link for saying Merry Christmas in Chinese which I just added to my Chinese Christmas Page.

The site, Good Characters seems to be selling several things, but one of them is providing advice on Chinese Names for businesses.

Labels: Chinese Christmas

Chinese Christmas is a much bigger holiday in China than I anticipated. The Christian Science Monitor, where this wonderful picture came from, has a great article - China decks the malls for Christmas shopping

Notice that the Santa in front of a Chinese Mall has a Chinese style beard seen in portraits of gods, and also has a darker skin, producing a Chinese Santa Claus!

Labels: Chinese Christmas

Cute article in the San Jose Mercury News - Teachers remember favorite — and offbeat — holiday gifts

This year my daughter made this home made candy (cookies?) for her teachers. She got some cute boxes to put them in. Per this article, handmade has a lot more meaning than a store bought gift. For some reason giving gifts to teachers seems to be pretty popular in my daughter's school district. My guess is cultural (lots of Chinese and Korean in the district) and showing respect to the teacher. In her middle school, I remember seeing some teachers with huge bags of presents they had received.

Labels: Chinese Christmas, Schools

From the blog of the WSJ, the Expat Life

This sentence leaps out at me:

Other American families of different faiths were also upset, but our British and Aussie friends couldn't understand why. It was another reminder that in my expat life, the cultural miscommunication is not always between me and China.

Separation of Church and State in the US I am sure nobody really understands. The economist had a wonderful cartoon a few years ago on an article explaining it. It was on one side state, and the other side church, with this non straight fence being put up by judges that went back and forth to keep a balance between both sides.

Peter Drucker taught the reason that Churches did so well in the US was the free market, and the lack of state support. This creates competition by churches for members. I can see this where I live, as the population changes to more Asian (Chinese mostly, some Korean), the churches are also changing as more and more Chinese and Korean Churches move in. One Lutheran church my daughter went with her hand bell choir was a few months later sold to a Korean Church. The Lutheran church moved out to Chino I believe. My daughter's school she went to through 5th grade, a Christian School, also got sold with plans to move out to Chino. Rick Warren spoke at Alumni Day last year for the Drucker School for Alumni Day.

Labels: Chinese Christmas