Growing up in America, Christmas meant arriving at my grandmother's house and immediately devouring a handmade gingerbread cookie drenched in sugar; driving with my Dad to “candy cane lane,” where homeowners took particular pride in stringing colorful lights on their gutters, windows and frontyard pines; and sneaking to our living room’s Christmas tree at 5am to sit in the dark staring at the presents, waiting until my mom said we were allowed to wake up and open them. Christmas began when Mannheim Steamroller’s Christmas songs played on the long ride home from Thanksgiving with relatives and continued through snowy Christmas tree lots, studies paused for classroom parties with pizza and soda pop, and the 1966 Grinch cartoon played on repeat.
Santa Clause 1863 apperance on Harper's Weekly established his apperance has a fat, white-bearded man. Photo via Wikimedia.
Modern Christmas is, in many ways, intrinsically American. European immigrants to New York brought with them a variety of Christian traditions influenced by pagan rituals, and in the 19th century’s stupefying swirl of capitalist industrialization, we got Santa Claus, Christmas lights and piles of packages containing the year’s newest toys. Disparate activities such as German wassailing songs and decorated trees, English greeting cards, and St. Nikkolas giving gifts to Dutch children all came together in America’s diverse cities, and became coated in a glimmering shade of consumerism aided by Hollywood and the day’s popular media, particularly Harper's Weekly. The holiday shed its rowdy associates and became the premier time for cherished family togetherness, largely independent of any religious belief. It’s a straight path from there to Hallmark Christmas movies, Toyotathon deals, and peppermint lattes.
Christmas decoration shops pop up in Vietnamese cities around the holidays, such as these seen in Hanoi.
I offer that as a necessary preface for how I understand Christmas in Saigon. With each passing year, the city seems to embrace it with increased fervor: Mariah Carey sings in Circle Ks selling Christmas tree-shaped pastries, coffee shops hang wreaths and serve candy cane drinks, and nightclubs announce fake snow events. Red and white trinkets, knickknacks and geegaws abound. On December 24, I passed through a hẻm where a local man dressed up like Santa was handing out packages to neighborhood kids assembled for a party beneath lights that had been strung by a man standing on a motorbike. Before Saigoneer had December 25 off, we held an office gift exchange. Huge crowds gather at the large churches as an entertainment spectacle.
Tân Định Church is brightly decorated for the holiday, while Christmas Eve mass attracts so many onlookers that they spill into the street and obstruct traffic.
With a few exceptions, it seems that Saigon has embraced the most bombastic, capitalist elements of the modern American Christmas. It is a shimmering but harmless distraction at best, a soulless carnival for corporate marketing departments at worst. America’s most wholesome facet of the holiday: a day off to gather with rarely seen family, is difficult, if not impossible, for many, with only rushed evening gatherings taking place.
Meanwhile, an evil history lurks in the margins of Saigon’s Christmas. “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” was the coded signal used by the US military on April 29, 1975 to began the evacuation, as alluded to in Ocean Vuong’s poem ‘Aubade with Burning City.’ The charming old photos of 1960s and 1970s Christmases cannot be seen outside the context of the war, death and destruction wrought by the soldiers for whom the decorations were strung up to satisfy.
Christmas in Saigon 1970. Photo via Đại Kỷ Nguyên.
So when it comes to Christmas in Saigon, maybe us non-Christians should resist its syrupy pull that serves little purpose beyond enticing us to spend money. For those of us who have fond memories of Christmas abroad, let us protect those tender nostalgias without marring them by doomed attempts to recreate them here. But I'm writing this on December 26, anyhow. Christmas is over, so to think of it, perhaps we should turn to a poet, fittingly from America, who recorded the annual taking down of the tree and observed: “all that remains is the scent / of balsam fir. If it’s darkness / we're having, let it be extravagant.”
