Christmas in Vietnam, December 2019

Greetings, it's December 2019 and I find myself in Vietnam, travelling and taking care of some personal business. And with that said, I offer a selection of Vietnamese Christmas photos.

On December 24, I took a train from HCM City (Saigon) to Hue to see the historical sites. The conductors were all wearing Santa hats. It was, like a lot of things on sees in Asia, surreal. As you can see in the picture below, I asked one of the conductors if I could take his picture and while he readily agreed, he also seemed to think it would be much better if we took the picture together, both wearing Santa hats. How could I say no to that

If you look carefully you can see a row of conductors with Santa hats.

This is a bit unusual because here you can actually see a reference to Jesus in the Christmas celebrations. While Vietnam does have a significant Catholic population and a growing number of members of other Christian sects, most people in Asia do not recognize Christmas as a religious holiday, but instead celebrate it in a secular way. Without a history of religious exclusivity in which one is expected to choose a single religion and stick with it, in my experience, many Asians finds the concept of a religious holiday celebrated by some members of a society and not others to be, well, foreign. Therefore they often tend to neglect to include Jesus and the entire spiritual side of Christmas altogether.

Now personally, I find this a bit irksome. I tend to be a fan of the left-wing Jesus, the one I personally feel is historically sound, the one who hung around with prostitutes, the poor, and the lepers, and was a general pain in the ass to the people in power, and who exposed hypocrisy and did radical things like encourage people to live up to their ideals and be nice to one another, and did so to such extent that the people in power finally killed him because of it. And, every Easter, I spend some time contemplating how a scruffy looking troublemaker who was probably covered in dirt and filth like his peers and probably not terribly sensible in his life choices, then, somehow, after death became an icon that, while highly interpreted according to people's needs, desires, background, and prejudices, has still proven an inspiration for literally billions for literally over two thousand years. However, like many things in Asia, and in life in general, the vast bulk of people do not really care what I think of the situation, but will continue doing whatever it is that they were doing before they met me.

Here you can see the above picture in context. Below are a variety of photos of Santa Claus and Christmas imagery taken around HCM City (Saigon) in December of 2019.