Christmas in Asia
One of the goals for this year was to learn how Christmas is celebrated around the world. The hope was to discover meaningful foods and traditions that we’d never heard of nor experienced before. And today was the start of that journey around the globe.
We started with Asia and that proved to be a bit harder than expected. With so few Christians living in these Asian countries, the celebrations tend to be a lot more muted or even nonexistent. So there weren’t as many foods and activities to choose from as one might expect.
While we were tempted on a Monday evening to just do KFC in honor of Japan's traditions (it’s fascinating and well worth a read!), we went with an Iranian stew and Indonesian cookies. For activities, we celebrated what we learned to be a Japanese tradition of listening to "Ode to Joy".
And we concluded by watching “Operation Christmas Drop”, which is a film about the US Air Force’s longest running humanitarian airlift in the world which has been air dropping supplies to the needy communities throughout the Pacific Ocean ever since 1952. In hindsight, Guam and Micronesia, which are the focus of this “Operation Christmas Drop” would have been a more appropriate fit for our exploration of traditions in the Oceania continent rather than Asia, but we’re learning so much as we go and being honest about our naiviaties and ignorances. And that’s not just about Christmas foods and traditions but also about basic geography!
MENU:
ACTIVITIES:
"Ode to Joy" (Japan)
"Operation Christmas Drop"
INTERESTING READS & CONTEXT:
