December 19 -- Christmas Celebration at the Deaf School

A lion dance began the celebration. This year the deaf school included the severely physically disabled students for the Lok Kan School next door in their Christmas festivities. The lion dance, with its action and color, was a big hit with the disabled students.	Special games were devised so that all the students, with whatever disability, could participate. The deaf students moved easily into the role of care providers and made sure everyone was involved.
After the games, the deaf students returned to their school and a special lunch was ready. It was nothing like what American students would expect, with no sweets, soft drinks, or desserts. The menu was fried rice, fried noodles, chicken wings, and broccoli, and a boiled rice porridge called jook.	Because of limited space, the eating area of the deaf school is also the assembly area is also the playground. Tables are set up when it is time to eat. Usually the tables are under the covered area, but on this day some students sat outside.

December 24 -- Christmas Eve

• Christmas decorations are up all over Hong Kong--but only in commercial centers. Very few private homes decorate for Christmas although sometimes you can look up and see a window on the seventeenth floor of some housing block outlined in twinkling lights. At Lok Fu Shopping Center near us, this year's theme is a Santa Claus flying on various contraptions.

• This morning I went to get a haircut at a little shop hidden in a literal alley in Kowloon City. The barber is always happy to see me. I've been going there for nine years, and I think the strange gwailo (foreigner) coming to his shop adds a bit of excitement to his life and even gives him some status and something to brag about. I was pleasantly surprised when he pulled my name card out of his wallet and said he hadn't sent a Christmas card because my address there didn't have a house number (We don't have one.) I'm sure he has never sent--or received--a Christmas card in his life so I was honored he wanted to send me one. A haircut now is HK$50, up from $13 when I first went there.

• This afternoon at 3:00 PM, a van load of workmen drove into the empty school yard at Bishop Ford Center where I live and started tearing out the old windows of one of the classrooms. The windows were replaced in several other classrooms during the summer break and now the rest will be refitted. It just struck me as odd that they would be arriving so late on Christmas Eve at a time when American workers would be hoping to get off work early to start the holiday!

• On my way to the bus stop tonight, I passed the housing block connected to Buddhist hospital down the hill from us. In the open area at the rear, two families were having a Christmas Eve barbecue on the grills there.

• Christmas mass with the deaf community was delightful. We started at 8:00 PM with a relatively small group because many of the young women don't like to come to our center at night because of its location. The liturgy went well except for the homily which was not as well prepared as I would have liked. And I even forgot to use the visuals that I had made!

  During the holiday season there are five liturgies in the space of two weeks, and each one doesn't get the attention it deserves. During the regular year, I spend a good part of each week getting together my thoughts, my Cantonese, and my Chinese sign language to say something relatively intelligent and intelligible.

  We had games afterwards for an hour and then food. The Chinese don't mess around with pretzels and cookies and cake. We had two kinds of fried rice, fried noodles, and a gelatin concoction cut into squares and dusted with shredded coconut.

• When I got home about midnight, the Filipinas in the center next door were in full swing with their Christmas celebrations. They had two fires blazing away outside and were singing their hearts out in true Philippine style. I worked on e-mail till 2:00 AM, and they were still singing went I went to bed then. And they were still singing at 3:30 AM when I briefly awakened.

December 25 -- Christmas Day

• At 9:00 AM I went over to the Filipina center for the dedication of a new grotto. The young women, all amahs (domestic servants) who have lost their contracts and need temporary shelter, made the grotto themselves and really did a remarkable job. A Filipino priest came for the mass which was held outdoors under a large banyan tree decorated with hanging ornaments in Philippine style. Some very creative animals--made of tied straw--adorned the manger scene they had created.

• Breakfast today was panettone, an Italian bread something like a light fruitcake. Every year the sisters in the school where the other priest and I go for mass give us this bread. It's delicious, the best thing to come from Italy since the Roman Empire! Lunch was a turkey sandwich. Supper was a value meal at McDonald's.

• I noticed a hole in my sweater so I sewed it up. Not a very fancy repair job, especially with a reddish thread on a maroon sweater, but, hey....at least the hole won't get any bigger!

• The shopping centers are jammed today as are the streets--more jammed than usual, that is. All the stores are open, and at least the ones along the bus route were full of customers. Near Bishop Ford Center, a construction crane was moving more steel to the top of a 25-story housing block going up.

• Hundreds of people spent their Christmas day sitting in long queues outside of government medical clinics. The recent outbreak of bird flu in Hong Kong, with now almost daily reports of suspected new cases, has caused adults and parents with sick children to seek diagnosis and medical treatment without delay. One clinic reported a 30% increase this past week in the number of patients treated.

• This afternoon St. Patrick's Parish, right down the street, had an evangelization rally. Last year six parishes in the area rented the large outdoor stage area in the Lok Fu Shopping Center for a similar event, but this year St. Patrick's did it alone--and did it well! More than 800 non-Catholic people came for the afternoon session which had been prepared in detail by 200 parishioners. It may seem strange to do something like that on Christmas, but for most people the 25th is just a holiday and they want to go out and do something so St. Patrick's gave them something to do with booths, music performances, face painting, clowns, etc. Everyone went home with St. Patrick's calendars and other handouts and hopefully with a good feeling about the Catholic Church.

• At dusk I took the #7 bus from Lok Fu to the harbor to see the Christmas lights for this year. Thousands of people thronged the promenade along the water on the Kowloon side. This year's lights were the best yet, with moving light displays for the first time and the size of the displays even greater.

December 26 -- After Christmas

• Partly because of the culture that appreciates and encourages plants and flower displays, and partly, I suspect, because the HK government has a lot of money, the seasons are always celebrated with a change of plants in shopping centers and parks and around public buildings. Plants are part of the decor year-round, but at Christmas and the Lunar New Year and other times, special plants are set out to match the festive season. Pictured are some of the hundreds of pointsettias placed around the Lok Fu Shopping Center, both inside and out on the sidewalk. None of them disappear!
• The older priest I live with has been sick and in bed most of the past three or four days. Because he has been in China and Hong Kong since before I was born, though, he has a constant stream of visitors and continuous phone calls during big holiday periods. I've been fielding all his calls and trying to discourage people from coming when they're hell-bent on making their annual Christmas visit. Sometimes I just unplug the extension cord to his room and let the phone ring in the living room when the calls are particularly fast and furious.

• Today is Boxing Day on the British calendar. I still haven't heard a good explanation of why it's called Boxing Day and what it stands for--at least not two explanations which agree with each other!

December 27 -- Two Days after Christmas

• The priests I talked with agreed on two things about HK's celebration of Christmas:
  1. Huge crowds appeared for the Christmas services at all the Catholic churches. Some of the people didn't appear to have a clue why they were there. In Beijing it was reported that Christmas midnight mass was the first time many Chinese young people were ever in a Catholic church, and it was part of a night's festivities. First they ate with their friends, then went to midnight mass, then went to discos.
  2. On December 26th, Christmas was OVER! Maybe the churches still had nativity scenes set up inside and many stores still have Christmas decorations in the windows, but Christmas is gone: no mention of it on the radio, no Christmas music, etc. That's not too surprising in a non-Christian culture and points out how for much of the world Christmas is merely a commercial opportunity, like Valentine's Day, only bigger.