I took these cute pictures of a couple kissing on one of the Cheonggyecheon bridges, while I was out with my buddy taking video of the Christmas lights last week. It took some color altering to actually see the couple, but I still think they're nice photos.
The Sunday before Christmas, Wifeoseyo and I went down to the Express Bus Terminal Station, where lines 3, 7, and 9 meet.
Most of the year, in this underground area, there are tons and tons of live plants you can buy, which is great. However, during Christmas, the underground shopping center that's below the street at the south end of Gosok (Express Bus Terminal) station, near the entrance to Shinsegye Department Store.
Wifeoseyo and I went down there, and we found everything from lovely to tacky (mostly the latter) and a huge variety of things. We found scented candles that smelled like pine and apple/cinammon. We found a christmas tree and strings of lights and wreaths and garlands. We got some christmas tree ornaments and pipe cleaner snowflakes to hang on the walls. In general, what you find at the bus terminal shopping center is a little less... um... K-mart... than what you find in Namdaemun.
And readers, it wasn't a whole heck of a lot, but it made the house look a little like Christmas. And that was important to us this year. And the scented candles even made it smell like Christmas this year, and that was nice, too.
And for your benefit, here are the two places I've found Christmas Decorations in Seoul. If you know of another one, let me know, and send me a location on google maps, and I'll totally add it.
"I'll be seeing my dad,
my brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
they'll be drinking white wine in the sun" full (lovely) lyrics: well-written and full of humor, assonance, internal rhyme, and poetry. Critical of organized religion... but gets right to the heart of why you don't have to be religious to love Christmas.
White Wine in the Sun, by Tim Minchin
And I'll say, writing songs that pretty is the only way I can forgive his teased, mad-scientist/electroshock mullet.I think this song is an eloquent defense of an atheist's Christmas: not everybody subscribes to the various religions that have their eight crazy nights, etc., at the time of the Midwinter Festival (worst name I've heard so far), but this song is a lovely affirmation of the one thing shared by almost all the different holiday season celebrations: getting together with the family.
Now, coming from a religious family, the sacred part of Christmas is important to me: while I think "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" bumper stickers are tacky, and A Charlie Brown Christmas is preachy, it was still important for me to catch the Christmas Mass at Myeongdong Cathedral with Wifeoseyo, to hear their choir sing a bit of Handel's Messiah, and to stand outside, and check out the nativity scene in the bitter cold. No pictures, because it was literally too cold for my camera to work, but the Nativity outside Myeongdong Cathedral doesn't put the baby Jesus in the manger until Christmas morning.
Folks, Korea's my home... but the time it feels least like home is during Christmas, when I'm far away from my family, and when Christmas is celebrated very differently.
Now, I recognize, as Bobster stated in the comments last time I bellyached about this, that I don't really have much right to complain, when I'm choosing to be here, and I don't really have a say in how Korea does Christmas... I've written before about the fact nobody owns a culture, and will expand on that soon, in response to a few comments I've had recently: Koreans are in the wrong to complain about Japanese Kimuchi or a Turkish family owning a Korean restaurant in Edmonton that makes more money than the Korean-owned one, but when the shoe's on the other foot, and Korean Christmas is about couples and ice cream cake instead of families and turkey, we are also wrong to get in a snit.
That's because there's the emotional issue of not feeling at home in this kind of christmas, and the logical issue of recognizing that it's not really my place to tell Korea how to celebrate Christmas. But as homesickness goes, it's OK when the emotional issue doesn't jibe with the logical conclusion, because this is my Christmas, darnit! So yeah, that's how I feel... and I'm glad people close to me understand and care how I feel, but I wouldn't write a letter to City Hall or the Chosun Ilbo telling all of Korea "You're doin' it wrong!" and if I did, I'd ripely deserve the middle finger and the "Yankee go home" I'd get in reply.
I raised this point because: for Christmas to feel like Christmas to me, I have to be more intentional than I had to back in Canada, because the elements that make me feel Christmassy are not the same elements that are emphasized in Korea's Christmas celebration. In Canada, people get eggnog foisted upon them so often we're happy it'll be a year before we have to smell it again... but here in Korea, you have to head down to Itaewon to that place selling illegal goods smuggled off the army base just to taste it. Same for turkey stuffing. Meanwhile, silly hats and ice cream cakes and "Last Christmas" by Wham! and all its remakes are practically clogging the air and making it hard to walk in a straight line.
So here are the things that make ME feel like Christmas:
1. The sacred Christmas carols (The First Noel, Silent Night, Hark The Herald, O Come Immanuel, Joy to the World, for starters)
2. Handel's Messiah
3. Something religious - church, a carol sing, something.
4. Turkey Dinner. With STUFFING.
5. (new addition:) Spiced Wine
6. Being around my favorite people, preferably in groups.
7. Phoning the family that's not immediately nearby
8. A Christmas Tree
9. Flashing Christmas lights
10. Presents
11. It's a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, How The Grinch Stole Christmas (cartoon)
12. Candles
And I've been working hard to try and check as many of those boxes as I could during this holiday seasons. I'm happy to say I did. No, I didn't have a huge Christmas dinner party like I did last year with my nemesis Dan Gray, but Wifeoseyo was wonderfully supportive this year in seeing to it that we touched on as many of those elements as we could, which was nice, seeing as we have to forge out a Christmas tradition of our own, now that we're married. It was a fine first Christmas together.
I'll write a few posts this week about the varying degrees of success I had tracking down each of these things.
3. If you really want to make Christmas mean something for somebody, you need to learn about Kiva.org... maybe you've heard about microfinance before -- mini-loans for people who need just a little kick to get themselves going. Kiva is a place where you can choose who you sponsor, you can loan small increments toward the goals people need, and you can take the money that gets paid back once the loans are paid back, and put it back into the microfinance system, and sponsor someone else.
I went to Gwanghwamun, City Hall, Lotte Department Store, and Shinsegye Department Store, and took some film of the Christmas lights on display there.
Unfortunately, the new video camera stores photos in a format that is incompatible with iPhoto. Yep. That's what I said. Good ol' Mr. Steve Jobs has created some of the best video and photo editing, organizing and storing programs out there, that are easy to use and all... and then picked a few arbitrary video and photo formats that won't work with them.
Yeah, I can buy the decoder program... but I'm pretty choked that I have to, especially when it's a flippin' CANON video camera - we're not talking about some obscure company from Whoknowswherezystan. Get with the stinking program, Mr. Jobs.
Anyway, without photos, but WITH video (already bought THAT converter)...I give you Christmas lights, 2010.
