Photos of the Week: Christmas in the City

The Bronx, New York. Photo by Chris Arnade

Chinatown, New York. Photo by Keith Goldstein

Chicago. Photo by Gabriel X. Michael

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It’s Not Christmas Without Inflatable Snowmen

One of my favourite Montreal traditions is the annual onslaught of Christmas kitsch. The official decorations are actually pretty tasteful — the elegant tree at Place Ville-Marie, the demure little wreaths installed on lampposts — so to compensate, people buy the tackiest decorations they can find and install them on balconies and in front yards with all the zeal of a deranged elf. Once, walking along Prince Arthur a few weeks before Christmas, I was started by an animatronic snowman that suddenly started flailing its arms and belting out holiday tunes.

Luckily for me, Hong Kong is crazy about Christmas, and the day after Halloween, the city starts decking itself out in candy canes and tinsel. Inflatable decorations aren’t quite as popular as they are in Montreal, and Christmas decor tends to be more flamboyantly big-budget than in Canada, but local district councils compensate with their own low-budget decorations at neighbourhood streetcorners. In 2008, a few months after I moved to Hong Kong, I was very happy to come across a gang of blow-up snowmen and Santa-hatted pandas at an intersection near my apartment. A bit of home in a faraway place.

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Chengdu’s Odd Christmas Tradition

I was at dinner last night when one of my friends told me about a strange Christmas Eve tradition in her hometown of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. “Every year, people go to the main pedestrian street and start hitting each other with inflatable toys,” she explained.

I was perplexed, though far from surprised. Christmas is an increasingly popular holiday in China, mostly because it offers a fun excuse to shop and socialize. Since China has no homegrown Christmas traditions of its own, though, many Chinese are inventing new ones. I asked my friend to send me some more information when she got the chance. So late last night, after she returned home from dinner, she emailed me a link to this Chinese discussion board post, which described the event and provided a lot of nice photos.

Imagine a flash mob, like one of those public pillow fights, that involves not just a few dozen people but tens of thousands of them. Armed with inflatable bats (many inexplicably decorated with the stars and stripes), they descend on Chendu’s main shopping district and start whacking each other over the head. There are families with young children, groups of teenagers, young couples and middle-aged people; all of them seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves.

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Christmas Time for the Jews

It’s December 25th, that bizarre day when much of the population seems to have vanished into their living rooms in a sugar-and-turkey-fuelled daze. But what about everyone else? If you don’t celebrate Christmas, there’s no better day to catch a movie or grab Chinese food, as this classic animation by Saturday Night Live’s Robert Smigel so aptly demonstrates.

Ho Ho Holiday Tackiness

This year, December in Montreal has been distinctly green, with few flakes to be seen, especially not on the twenty-fifth day of the month. It wasn’t much of a surprise, then, when I came across a snowman who was absolutely devastated by the lack of snow.

Montrealers have a particular fondness for tacky Christmas decorations: blinking lights, plastic raindeers, inflatable Santa Clauses that lord threateningly over the street from their third-floor perches. One evening I came across a reindeer doing things to a freakishly skinny Santa that are normally done behind closed doors. It’s like something you would find in a working-class suburb of Buffalo (or, at least, my own image of Buffalo, since I’ve never actually been there), except transplanted to a city where people have balconies, not front yards, which results in particularly dense and outrageous phantasmagoria.

The tacky holiday decorations even extend to Hanukkah: witness the menorah-mobile, which was parked on Park Avenue for all eight days.

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Lighting Up the Plaza for the 77th Time

Every Thanksgiving night, the Country Club Plaza district in Kansas City, Missouri sets aglow amid thousands of revelers. The older, faux-Spanish low-rise edifices are adorned with miles upon miles of Christmas lights.

The first iterations of what is now known largely as “The Plaza” were built in the 1920s in the formerly swampish southern nether-reaches of the city. The area today serves primarily as an upscale shopping and restaurant district, as well as a home for both condominium owners and apartment renters. Offices are now prevalent as well.

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