Eric's Beijing Diary

Sunday. Lately, I've been going to the Chinese service at 9am, and the new English service at 11am. In the Chinese service, the pastor was talking about Thanksgiving. He told how the pilgrims came to America, and why they left England.

American holidays are not always well understood in China, but they do get some attention. Christmas much more, I think, because it is such a money maker for the retail industry. Not anything like the States, to be sure. There is no official Christmas holiday, and parents are not "obligated" to buy presents for their children. China is a bit more like Japan that way, I think. Christmas is sorta like Valentine's Day or something. Nothing official, but a special day for going to dinner.

Thanksgiving does not have the market potential of Christmas, which is probably why it doesn't get the same attention. But there are a couple exceptions. English teachers often celebrate it with their students, and all the official Three-Self churches tend to have a Thanksgiving service on the Sunday nearest the fourth Thursday in November. This, I suppose, is due to their missionary roots. Family churches would not be so oriented.

But although most of Chinese society tends to be unaware of Thanksgiving (witness the government's refusal to allow the Kitty Hawk to dock in Hong Kong so that sailors could have Thanksgiving dinner with their families, who had flown over from the States), at least you could say that there is no hostility toward it. All the objections I hear come from foreigners, particularly foreigners who are not Americans, and are a bit miffed that a totally American holiday should get so much attention: As an Englishman, I find all this 'Happy Thanksgiving!' popping up all over China quite an irritation. I wish someone would just explain to the students that Thanksgiving is very parochial, limited to some 300 million people in the USA and others either have it on different days or, more often, don't have it at all.

As I explain to my students, I'm English. We don't have a Thanksgiving Day. The English are a phlegmatic race dedicated heart and soul to giving the impression they have nothing for which to be thankful... But Thanksgiving isn't going away. I doubt that it will ever gain the prominence of Christmas, but it will always get some attention, if for no other reason than that the hotels make quite a bit of money providing American style Thanksgiving dinners at a price that brings in a lot of money for one evening. The other reason is that although China does not have a Thanksgiving holiday, there is, of course, the "Mid-Autumn" festival. Most cultures understand and accept the idea of a harvest festival of some kind or another.