Korean Christmas

Christmas Dinner at the Village
Well, it's Christmas morning, and I'm here in the teachers' lounge, eating the re-warmed roasted chestnuts I bought in the street outside midnight mass last night. I know it's Christmas because this morning at breakfast the dinning hall was plastered with the kids' posters wishing everyone a "Mery Cris math day". Their wholesome holiday spirit was captured in their pictures of chainsaw wielding Rudolph, or StarWars characters and pirates thinly disguised as elves, skull and crossbones on their pointed hats. You're not fooling any one with that Christmas ornament eyepatch Scurvy Santa.

The kids stayed over for Christmas eve and were here this morning, instead of in their footy pajamas under a gift-ladden tannembaum, like I wish I was now. Christmas in Korea is not quite the life-stopping holiday we have built it up to be in America. Here it's more tantamount to St. Patrick's Day- there are some decorations, perhaps a parade, the daily greeting is adjusted from "hey, how are you?" to "Merry/Happy (insert applicable holiday here) to you". There are an abundance of merry little green men about and some go to church (people I mean, not the merry green men). But in the end it's just a reason to start drinking at 11am, just like St. Paddy's. Green beer or mulled wine, take your pick of Holiday spirits.

But for my first Christmas away from home, it's been pretty nice. For Christmas Eve we had a Secret Santa gift exchange and for dinner the dinning hall served roasted chicken and Christmas cookies. And I made the effort of going to midnight mass with a couple other teachers...it was an...interesting adventure. Story time:

We'd heard there was an English midnight mass at Myeong-dong Church, the most famous and beautiful cathedral in Seoul. We decided to brave the bitter chill and throngs of shoppers to make the 1.5 hour and 2 transfer subway trip. On the teeming underground everyone was either carrying cake boxes, or small children with Christmas hats, the kind their mothers bought for them to wear once a year and then endure being ridiculed for by their siblings for the rest of the year. On the way there I had my eye nearly put out on 3 occassions by stray reindeer antlers, wielded by the erratic head-turning of a toddler in a backpack.

Once emerging back out into the frosty night of Myeong-dong we maneuvered our way through the crowds of shoppers and street vendors selling remote controlled cars, fuzzy hats, and cinnemon filled pancakes. When we finally reached the church it was nearing a quarter-'til, and a long ribbon of warmly bundled Koreans snaked it's way down the hill under the glow of parking lot spotlights and foodstalls. Thinking we were clever, we bypassed this popsicle procession and headed for the English chapel adjascent to the Church. Well, turns out speaking English does not grant one any special line-jumping priveleges here in Korea...in fact, English mass was canceled altogether. We were hurriedly ushered out of the building by a man in white robes saying something in Korean, which I'm sure translated to, "Get your foreign butt back to the end of the icicle parade." Which we did, and stood shivering for about 20 minutes, during which I suffered two more hat-inflicted eye injuries.

But in the end the wait was recompensed by the opportunity to squeeze into an over-filled auditorium where we watched the Korean Mass going on in the cathedral next door via Proxima Telecomunications (I know it was Proxima because at a few key moments during the service the video feed "cut out" and we were left praying to their logo...technical difficulties or idolatrous marketing ploy? you decide)

The entire service was unintelligible to my foreign ears, but my familiarity with the Catholic Mass ritual was enough to help me chime in with the English recitation, attempting awkwardly to fit it with the cadence of the Korean version, which was usually a bit shorter. So I was repetedly caught in that awkward moment where my voice alone trailed on after the rest of the congregation was done: "...And lead us not into tempsthsahhhhh....*ahem*...echoing cough...

After mass we walked back through the slightly less crowded night streets of Myeong-dong, first stopping at a steamy tent stall for hot oh-dang (processed fish bologna, foldeded and treaded onto skewers, cooked in a giant communal vat of onion broth) and then some hot roasted chestnuts- completing the Christmas feeling. And now this morning I'm finishing off the last of the chestnuts and wishing you all that same Christmas chestnutty goodness wherever you may be.