Christmas Eve = Apples

China seems to have developed it's own tradition for Christmas Eve which I find quite interesting and amusing. In Chinese, instead of calling December 24 "Christmas Eve," it's called "Silent Night" (or more accurately "Peaceful Night"). This is the same phrased used in the song "Silent Night" when it's sung in Chinese. The Chinese word for "Peaceful Night" is 平安夜 Ping An Ye. The first character "ping" has the same pronunciation (though a slight variation in the character) as the first half of the Chinese word for "apple" which is 苹果 Ping Guo. So, someone somewhere in China has decided you need to give out apples on Christmas Eve. Seems a bit of a stretch to me, but I don't think foreigners get a vote in this newly adopted Chinese Christmas tradition.

In Yichang, Katie and I got the occasional Christmas Eve apple but the apple buying and selling seemed somewhat contained. In Mengzi, however, Christmas Eve creates and all-out apple craze. Shops and fruit stalls have capitalized on this apple idea. Not only do they sell apples for Christmas Eve, but they sell special paper that you can wrap the apples up in. The more sheets you use, the more expensive, and therefore more desirable and valuable (I guess) the apples become--not that elaborately wrapped apples taste any different. Katie said one of her students got an apple wrapped in 99 sheets of paper so that then it looks like a huge paper flower. Seems overly extravagant and pointless to us--who needs an apple covered in 99 pieces of paper? Guess it's some kind of Chinese Christmas status symbol.

Since Katie, Dave, and I were hosting lots of student Christmas parties, we ended up with nearly 15 wrapped up apples between the three of us that students gave us when they came over. We decided instead of opening them all and trying to eat them ourselves (Katie had already been given an orchard-worth of fruit to eat by some of her students), we passed the pretty apples on to the hotel staff since they're all really nice about helping us whenever we need something for our apartments (our apartments are part of the campus hotel).

Here I am holding a wrapped and unwrapped apple. And the second picture is me trying to hold all the wrapped up apples that we got.

On Christmas Eve, while leaving campus to go to the Rice's house, we noticed there were hundreds of students holding wrapped apples all milling around campus and the front gate. It's like they knew it was a holiday and to them that meant they should buy an apple, but then it seemed like they didn't really know what to do since China doesn't have any traditions of celebrating Christmas. So the students were all just hanging out and walking around outside. Mostly it seemed like couples. I think the apple giving has turned in to a Valentine's Day-type idea where your boyfriend is almost obligated to give you an apple.