Christmas is not the same everywhere, and isn’t that a good thing?
Every December when I was a young girl, the phone company set up a special phone number that we could call to hear Santa speaking from various countries. He’d tell us about Christmas traditions in those places and of course wish us a Merry Christmas. I’d then get out my globe and imagine what it might be like to celebrate Christmas around the world.
This episode is from me, not Santa, but it’s my way of saying happy holidays to you by sharing a few Christmastime traditions from various countries
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
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See also:
The Caganer nativity tale: a pooping figure in Catalan Christmas culture
Japan’s bizarre Christmas tradition: eating KFC (here’s why)
Cover image of Sinterklaas candy from Pixabay (artist: dassel, https://pixabay.com/photos/saint-nicholas-chocolate-sintsnoep-2934899)
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
Hello everyone! I hope you are enjoying the holiday season, and if not, don’t worry, it’ll be over pretty soon.
So if you’ve been listening to me for a while, I hope you have a sense that I’m not just talking about fun facts, but I’m trying to inspire some wonder, maybe even some awe, about how interesting the world is. And this time of year, I think it’s really interesting to think about how many different cultures and different countries have a wide variety of ways of celebrating Christmas. So I will present some fun facts tonight, and maybe you’ll find it wonder-inspiring in the sense that there can be such a diversity in terms of celebrating what’s ostensibly the same holiday.
If Christmas is not your holiday, hopefully you’ll find it of cultural interest anyway. And again, it’ll all be over very soon.
So I live in northern Portugal, in the city of Braga, and on Christmas Eve, I will be going down to the city center for the Bananeiro, which is the banana festival, I guess we could call it in English. Many people from the city and from outside of the city come in, and they go to the city center and eat bananas and drink moscatel wine, sweet wine. There’s actually a shop called Casa das Bananas. It means “house of bananas,” and in the early 1970s some shopkeepers started this tradition. First they were drinking the moscatel, I think, and then they added the bananas, and now it’s become this tradition. I think even tourists come into town for it. So that’s what I’m doing on Christmas Eve, which is kind of weird, right?
But I’m going to talk about some traditions in other places.
One thing that I find interesting is how different cultures have Santa, but it’s not quite Santa, it’s somebody else. Or figures who are doing the same thing as Santa.
So for example, I read that in Syria, a camel is the one who brings good children their Christmas gifts, because it makes sense if there are a lot of camels around and they’re really far from the North Pole, that it would be a camel and not, you know, Santa.
I lived in the Netherlands for several years, and there on the 5th of December, they welcome Sinterklaas. He looks kind of like Santa, but he’s not Santa. You can find a picture of him if you want to.
Actually, in the middle of November, they have a televised special. I think all the children in the entire country tune in, because he arrives to a certain predetermined city in the Netherlands on a boat, and the boat came, so the story goes, from Spain. And he is on a white horse, and he’s got a bunch of helpers called Zwarte Piet, Black Piet. They are very controversial, and there have actually been numerous protests regarding Sinterklaas’ helpers being in blackface. I’m not gonna say any more about that right now. But he lives in Spain, not the North Pole, because it’s not Santa.
Dutch children are taught that if they’re naughty, one of his helpers might put them into a sack and send them to Spain. And my husband was actually at a store, and there was a little boy crying and misbehaving. I wasn’t there, I don’t know exactly what he was doing, but his father was shaking his finger at the boy saying, “Spanje, Spanje, Spanje.” And this was not too long before Sinterklaas was supposed to come, so the little boy probably shaped up quickly.
Now, in Finland, I’ve learned from my Finnish friend Tuula, that Santa doesn’t live in the North Pole. He lives on, oh, I’m not gonna pronounce this right, Korvatunturi. (There, Tuula, how’d I do?) This is a mountain in Finnish Lapland, right along the Russian border, and the mountain is shaped like an ear so that it can hear children’s wishes.
Now, we don’t usually think of China as being a Christmas hotspot, but Santa is there. In fact, I guess they have a lot of Santas in China. And he’s very often playing the saxophone. Sometimes he plays the trumpet, and I think sometimes he plays the French horn, but sax is his main instrument.
Also, in many countries like China which don’t have a majority Christian population, they have still really gotten into the commercial and secular aspects of Christmas. In the United Arab Emirates, Dubai apparently has many enormous Christmas trees, and Christmas season there corresponds to the Dubai Shopping Festival, and there are huge shopping malls there. So if you’re into malls, giant Christmas trees, and lavish brunches on Christmas day, Dubai might be the place for you. And you can even go skiing because they have an indoor ski hill.
So what are some other interesting Christmas traditions?
Did you know that in Catalonia, which is in northeastern Spain, they have the Caganer? The Caganer is a little figurine who goes into the nativity scene, and he’s usually hiding there, which you may approve of because he’s got his pants down taking a poo. He’s always fertilizing the nativity scene, and the story is that long ago, it was very important to think about fertilizing your fields, and they needed to use not only the manure from animals, but also from people. And it became good luck to have one of these Caganers in your home, and especially around Christmas time.
So now you can go to a store in Barcelona, for example, and buy figurines of politicians, famous movie stars, the whole Simpsons family — Homer, Bart, Lisa, everybody — and even Santa himself as Caganers with their pants down taking a crap on the floor.
I’ll talk about a couple more countries that have very interesting Christmas traditions. And again, this is like fun Christmas facts. I hope you enjoy them.
If you go to a traditional Ukrainian home at Christmas time, you are likely to see a Christmas spider on the tree. Some people think this is the inspiration for putting tinsel on a tree. There are various stories behind the spider, but in general the spider is considered good luck and weaves beautiful threads, and really can be considered a household friend. I love that.
So I’m going to leave you with one final country-specific Christmas tradition, which I also love.
Do you know what people love to eat for Christmas dinner in Japan? And yeah, Japan is not a traditionally Christian country, but this has nothing to do with the birth of Jesus Christ. This is about having a meal. And the meal that many, many Japanese people enjoy the most on Christmas day is KFC, but they call it “Kentucky.”
This tradition stems from a campaign in 1974, in which the American fast food chicken chain, then known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, with the Colonel and his little bow tie, advertising in Japan that people should go have Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas, supposedly because there was either one foreign customer, or I’m suspecting maybe more than one, who made it known that they couldn’t get their traditional American style turkey in Japan. So they would go to KFC instead because it was the best they could do.
KFC in Japan is now so in demand on Christmas Day that you have to order several weeks, even months, in advance. You can get a huge bucket of KFC chicken, but it’s not just chicken. In one of the videos I saw, it was chicken, lasagna, and tiramisu with a special commemorative plate. So isn’t that lovely? I don’t know that you’ll be doing that on Christmas where you live, but it’s always an option.
Anyway, I’ll stop talking and just wish you a Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah or happy any holiday that you celebrate at this time of year. And if you don’t celebrate any holidays, I hope you have a peaceful time anyway. I will probably not say anything else on this podcast until the new year, so happy holidays and happy New Year!