the bastard strikes again.

[kaigou]

Yesterday when I was at the market, I realized I'd forgotten the single most important reason to NEVER LEAVE THE FREAKING HOUSE (at least for the month of December): the goddamn christmas songs everywhere.

Okay, some songs aren't entirely christmas songs, but they fit the mood, like in the aisles at the locally-owned (since 1897! it trumpets) hardware store and hearing Billie Holiday singing I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm. I could do without ever hearing The Little Drummer Boy ever again for the rest of my life (if only I could be so lucky) and no I don't care who covered it, I still hate that damn song. Most hymns I can let go in one ear and out the other, although I do find it somewhat disturbing, to this day, that Little Town of Bethlehem is in a minor key with some pretty depressing modulations in there; even as a child I had the impression that the song was saying the entire event was going to go south and fast, possibly with multiple deaths and some foreboding hints at a sequel.

So I'm gritting my teeth while I'm searching for the sweet potato chips CP likes, and doing a passable version of keeping my internal conversation loud enough to drown out the worst of the auditory pap -- until I get to the check-out counter. The girl is ringing me up, and I'm just standing there, card in hand waiting for my turn in the dance, when I realize the song playing overhead and wishing I had the ability to throw a curse back through time to whomever though such unadulterated tripe would make for a great holiday song, and then suddenly -- for what might even be the first time ever -- I don't listen to what the song means. I just listen to what it says.

I ask the clerk, do you hear that?

Clerk: what?
Me: the song. The song that's playing.
Clerk: Uhm. Yeah. *confused but pleasant* What about it?
Me: the words. What they're actually saying *points to ceiling-speakers*
Song: Where nothing ever grows / No rain nor rivers flow / Do they know it's Christmastime at all?
Clerk: Uhm.
Me: My god, that is the most freaking xenocentric, ego-freaking-tistical, culturally-biased goddamn line and I've been hearing this song for how many years now and I only just realized it? Who wrote this crap!?
Clerk: *stops ringing stuff up, totally distracted* I think it was a bunch of people.
Me: A bunch of freaking morons, you mean. Come on! *points to ceiling-speakers, listens to refrain* So basically the message is that everyone's miserable but if they just knew it's Christmas that they'd be happy, or something?
Clerk: It's supposed to be a christmas song.
Me: Yeah, but we're assuming the people they're singing about actually care whether or not it's christmas. If they're not christian, then the answer is probably, gee, not freaking much.
Clerk: *not even trying to keep track of ringing stuff up*
Me: Okay, honestly, Chunyun is way better.
Clerk: *stares* What? *mumbles* I don't know what that is...
Me: Chunyun! *manages to keep straight face* No way! Chunyun! What kind of heathen are you?
Clerk: Uhm.
Me: Four out of every five persons on this entire planet celebrate Chunyun! It's the biggest holiday! It's when you're with loved ones, celebrating, giving gifts, spending time together after not seeing them--
Clerk: *tries to smile* Uhm, it's Christmas?
Me: *cracks* Actually, it's New Year's. Chinese New Year's. But man, see, when January 18th or whatever rolls around, you could be happy but you'll be miserable because you don't even realize it's Chunyun! You'll be lucky to make it through the night alive, you'll be wretched and pathetic, but noooo, if only you knew it's Chunyun!
Hispanic guy behind me in line: February 14th.
Me: Hunh?
Clerk: Valentine's Day?
Guy: Chinese New Year's. It's February 14th.
Me: Whoops. Okay! Miserable on Valentine's day, how's that for irony.
Clerk: How do you know when New Year's is?
Guy: Because my wife is Chinese... *grin* And we always celebrate Chunyun.
Me: AHAH. I rest my case.

I still hate that song, but at least I feel better now that I have a rant practiced and ready for smoother repetition the next time I have to hear it while in line. Or maybe this year I'll finally wise up and have my iPod with me, with headphones, and just tune out the entire listening experience. Who knows what else might set me off...

Comments

[starlady]

I was just thinking somewhat similar thoughts about that song today. Along the lines of, "Wait. The Nile is in Africa." Or it was the last time I checked, anyway...

You and the dude behind you in line win.

[branchandroot]

*extremely amused* Hey, backup from the bystanders is good.

even as a child I had the impression that the song was saying the entire event was going to go south and fast, possibly with multiple deaths and some foreboding hints at a sequel.

Yeah, this always weirds me, too. I mean, seriously. Half of the most popular hymns sound like dirges. A few of them actually /are/, come to think of it. I think it's mostly a modal holdover from medieval music though.

[okaasan59]

How come I'm never in line with you???

[sharibet]

I'm another one of those holiday grumps who shudder at the thought of venturing to the shops at this time of year. At least Costco doesn't play freakin' music. And I can stock up on enough food there that I won't have to venture out again until Boxing Day.

For everything else, my MP3 player is a sanity-saver, though I do remove my earphones out of courtesy to the clerk when I get to the register.

[kaigou]

Well, I kinda left out that he also corrected my pronunciation. Subtly, but he did. Which was actually even more hysterical, now that I think about it.

[kaigou]

Half of the most popular hymns sound like dirges.

And the other half sound like recycled drinking songs.

[kaigou]

Given the way most people react when I do speak in line, you'd probably actually be one of the ones backing away. It's not really that common to find someone who chimes in.

[salinea]

You are awesome. As a fellow warrior against Christmas, I say to you "well done!"

[kaigou]

This is true. Costco's lack of music is one reason I love that place, although the rest of the year I enjoy our local grocery store, which has been known to play the Clash, Joan Jett, and even a rousing go of the Ramone's I Wanna Be Sedated. I'm willing to overlook their xmas music, since they don't go overboard with it, doing an xmas song and then two or three secular songs. The market I was at, though, was pretty bad for every song being an xmas song, while the hardware store did all the religious xmas songs. Both were pretty bad, though at least I can tune out God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen with a bit more ease than yet another flippin' rendition of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. Ffffftttt.

[kaigou]

Hahaha, and I didn't even learn about Chunyun when I studied Mandarin -- it only happened to be in my head b/c I'd been researching Chinese (summertime) holidays and saw a mention that 2.6billion people traveled for Chunyun last year, and that doesn't even count all the people celebrating who hosted all those travellers. So I kinda fudged a little, since I also know (thanks to more research) that xtians are 33% of the world's population at 2.1billion, so I figured 2.6billion plus all the hosts made for a LOT of people celebrating Chunyun.

And the rest was just my natural snark rising to the fore, because that song is truly a paragon of cultural self-centeredness.

[salinea]

I didn't know about Chunyun (well, that it was called that) until I read your post XD

No way! Chunyun! What kind of heathen are you?
I wept tears of joy there ;)

[kaigou]

Technically Chunyun, if I'm remembering this correctly, is a two-week or three-week stretch of time. It's like a really long Boxing Day, and it starts just before the New Year and ends just after the entire two-week New Year's thing. It's basically when you're supposed to go home and see relatives, but it's really exploded in the past decade with China opening its borders for easier traveling into and around the country. The drawback is that the start of Chunyun nearly cripples the Chinese train, bus, and airline system because that many people at once is, well, wow. I think it's something like more people are travelling in Chunyun than the entire number of tickets purchased on the British railway system in an entire year. My mind can't even wrap around that one.

Haha, I'm a heathen, but I was a heretic first, and what's the good of being a heretic if you can't scare the natives?

[squalay.livejournal.com]

Saw this through a friend of a friend and thought you might like to know the most hilarious (and by hilarious I mean infuriating) part.

The song with the immortal lines 'Underneath that burning sun, do they know it's Christmas time at all?' was written to raise charity for Ethiopia. Considering Ethiopia is the second-oldest Christian state in the world, I'm going to guess yes. Yes they do know it's Christmas time.

[kaigou]

Cripes, I'd thought (all this time) it was for South Africa, though that could be because I'd confused it with yet another "bunch of rich western singers get together and hold hands" song, like maybe the one about apartheid. Erm.

Yes. Ethiopia. Okay, I think we've passed beyond heddesk moment. Far, far beyond. It never even occurred to me that the song was about the Ethiopian famine -- probably because, uhm, that country does have rivers, and hey, mountains, too, along with the whole Christian-state and one-third Muslim population and no small percentage of Jews, along with being mentioned in the xtian Bible and being one of the few African countries to have a full seat in the United Nations, IIRC. Not exactly barefoot and ignorant, I mean.

Then again, this would also presume that anyone from Hollywood and/or the music business actually had a freaking clue, which may be too much to ask, in most cases.

[squalay.livejournal.com]

Considering this song gets trotted out everytime the Western world is a Generic African State's only hope for survival, I wouldn't be surprised if they did do a version about the arpartheid. But the original was written in about three days after Bob Geldof saw a news report about the Ethiopian famine.

And of course, there is always the argument that the money raised by that single went to prolonging the war in Ethopia and the dictator-enforced famine by proxy so. It really is a travesty of a song on every level.

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

That song was actually meant to be depressing. It was written to raise funds for aid to Ethiopia during the famine back in the 1980s.

[kaigou]

Except it's not depressing, it's just mindlessly and religio-centrically superior in a way that's not even justified.

Although I will have to adjust my rant if I repeat it in the future, now that someone's reminded me it's about Ethiopia, which does have a significant and incredibly rich xtian history. (I'd thought it was about one of the other famines that swept through in the 80s, and didn't realize it was specifically about Ethiopia.)

See the comment a few above yours for more info.

[kaigou]

My 9th grade teacher had to flee Ethiopia with her children when the monarchy fell, so we actually learned more about that country than any of the rest of the African countries, because she had first-hand knowledge. She didn't push pro-monarchy on us, but what we saw in the news wasn't the entire story (not that it ever is). Thanks to her, to this day I know all sorts of stuff about Kush, which also frustrated me to do a paper on it -- there was almost no information at all, one of the greatest cities of ancient history, and yet you can find tonnes of papers and articles if you headed farther north to where the citizens had been lighter-skin tone. A real eye-opener to a fourteen-year-old kid.

As I mentioned to Triv (below), I suspect if I have chance to trot the rant out again, it'll be considerably different next time, and even more full of snark at the truly epic fail.

[opheliastorn.livejournal.com]

Or can become them, with little encouragement.

[fromastudio]

*wikis* I wonder if Chunyun is a China thing rather than a Chinese thing per se - I'd never heard the term (although 'chun' + 'yun' is pretty intuitive, obviously!) or even the concept, and neither had either of my parents.

and to be fair (because I believe in giving the culturally monolingual some benefit) the equivalent of Chunyun is probably more like Advent. so the poor beleaguered clerk probably had some good reason to be bewildered. (I couldn't have told you what Advent was several years ago. and I'm Christian. not even heretical unless one takes the kind of high view of scripture that assumes everyone else is taking the low view. )

[annotated_em]

"I do find it somewhat disturbing, to this day, that Little Town of Bethlehem is in a minor key with some pretty depressing modulations in there; even as a child I had the impression that the song was saying the entire event was going to go south and fast, possibly with multiple deaths and some foreboding hints at a sequel."

*amused* Well, didn't the entire thing go really south? I mean, with the Herod vs. babies thing, and then the whole crucifixion thing some thirty-odd years later, and all...

But I snark. *beams at you* This entire post is made of both win and awesome.

[fromastudio]

to be more accurate, we do celebrate fifteen days of the New Year with an emphasis on the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth (called Chap Go Meh/Fifteenth Night in my dialect). that period is more or less what is being described as Chunyun, I'm guessing, going from the Wikipedia article.

[kaigou]

I think it's actually pretty universal, though probably only known by that name if you're PRC -- I mean, "going home for the holidays" is something pretty much anyone does if/when they get a chance, right? Hundreds of thousands (or more) xtians travel home for xmas, as well. Plus when you're dealing with anything Chinese, there's always the issue of a single event being known by a variety of names because of the variety of dialects.

Even so, if I'd not been able to pull up an actual holiday in my head, I would've made one up, to demonstrate the arrogance of saying that an entire people are unhappy and miserable because they don't realize it's someone else's Big Holiday Event. The poor beleaguered clerk had all the earmarks of being standard issue from around here -- a romance-language first name on her tag, fair skin and pale hair, a teutonic cast to her face shape, and a cross hanging on a chain around her neck. In her defense, it'd probably never even occurred to her that the majority of the world is not xtian, seeing how much it's near-universal in the States -- but here's hoping that an interaction like this will make her think twice on that in the future.

The ultimate irony, of course, is in squalay's reply, which points out that the song is about the Ethiopian famine (I'd forgotten that detail) and that Ethiopia is one of the world's oldest xtian states, as in politically xtian, not just "has a plurality of xtians" but formally has had christianity as its official religion.

Really, the entire song is made of fail, to the point that I don't think I could come up with anything that comes anywhere near close. Even with a made-up holiday!

[kaigou]

And not everyone calls Christmas, 'christmas', as well -- there are large chunks of the world that call it Yule, instead -- a term I'd heard in hymns growing up but never knew was an actual alternate-name for the event.

[kaigou]

That's me, providing entertainment for the masses on journaling-like systems since 2004!

[aishuu]

You are so going to end up on customers suck. <3 Brilliant, though.

[kaigou]

More likely "customers are idiots but amusing idiots" since I make a point of always leaving 'em laughing. If you can get someone to crack up, you're forgiven a great deal.

[jetsam]

Far from my favourite song either, but (I think someone's said already) it is about Christian kids. I do like O Little Town, but rarely the versions they put on CDs. You need a proper choir to make it sound good.

I have to admit that I haven't heard of Chunyun, though I am familiar with Chinese New Year (and could havea told you the date). I had a look on wiki, and I'm still a bit confused as to when it is. I mean, is it like Advent, a set period every year? Or more like summer holidays, which you can always approximate from state schools but which are a bit fluffier in definition? Wiki looked a bit like it was just the process of doing a big trip home, and I'm not sure I'd call that a celebration as such, so I was wondering whether that was the meaning you were using.

(There are a lot more people in China than in the UK. I'm not surprised there are more trips there in holiday season than here all year)

[fromastudio]

to clarify, the equivalence here is referring to a temporal sense - the actual characters for Chunyun suggest that as originally coined the phrase refers to the practice of travelling and not the festivities themselves. How you have heard the phrase used is of course a different matter; I can only say that I'm not familiar with the phrase. 春节 chunjie is pretty standard, as is plain 新年 xinnian。

I would not expect my typical classmate in primary school to recognise, even now, the phrase 'Yule', or even connect it with Christmas. And by that same token I wouldn't expect most Australians to recognise what 春运 chunyun was, or even 春节.

That's like, you know, saying 'Yule' or 'Christmas' instead of '圣诞节'shengdanjie to someone who didn't speak English. And in either case I wouldn't expect the person to feel particularly enlightened or even curious about the experience.

[fromastudio]

incidentally, apologies if I've been giving conflicting definitions re: what I think Chunyun might be or involve -as I said, I hadn't encountered the phrase before and I was trying to narrow it down to possible usages and definitions.

[kaigou]

It's more like Advent, as someone else mentioned -- from what I've gathered via mild research, it's a generalized period of time surrounding the new year, during which there's a massive increase in travel because everyone is going home to visit. The best english analogue is probably what the western world just calls "the winter holidays" -- that rough period of time from just before hanukah and ending somewhere in the week of post-xmas to new years. The concept of a "new year" that starts mid-winter seems to be close to universal; it's just that in the western world, our major religious winter holidays are spread out among several religions whose holidays don't all converge on a single point. That means our travelling is increased but not compressed, yet at the same time are pretty static, calendar-wise, since xmas itself has a specific date so most official-holiday calendars rotate around that. Asian New Year's uses a different calendar system, obviously, so the migration patterns for that are going to shift based on the specific year, much like any increase in travel for folks going home for Passover would change by the year -- but as others have pointed out, it's not really a specific event in and of itself, so much as an umbrella term for a whole host of potential/included events.

The bottom line, though, is that it's something that a massive, massive number of people participate in and are aware of and consider an important annual event -- and yet the fact that we're pretty ignorant of it in the US doesn't diminish their experience, but neither does it render us lonely and miserable to be ignorant, either. That's what gets me about the stupid song, that unlike most xmas songs -- which revolve around the holiday itself (religiously or otherwise) and one's enjoyment of it (or lack thereof, eg I'll be home for christmas if only in my dreams) -- this particular song's message is "if only they weren't ignorant of christmas, they'd see everything as wonderful, like we do!" kind of schlock.

That kind of xenocentric arrogance sets my teeth on edge.

[kaigou]

The hidden humor in here is that my brain actually went completely!blank! on what the word was for New Year's. (Gawds, my professor would've just shaken his head at me and made that clicking sound with his tongue.) I could vaguely remember it was something-nian and woosh, there went the rest. I suspect chunyun stood out b/c a) it'd been in recent research, and b) it amused me greatly to think of all those poor travel-service folks dreading the upcoming onslaught of two billion people trying to all take the train at the same time. Man, the nightmare!

And in either case I wouldn't expect the person to feel particularly enlightened or even curious about the experience.

The issue isn't whether or not some retail clerk is going to spend any amount of time curious about someone else's holidays -- the issue is, to me, that there's hopefully one less person in this country willing to take for granted that it's right and proper to treat our customs as universal and those who fail to follow those customs as somehow lacking or ignorant in some way.

That, simply put, the Western/US world is not the center of the universe in any cultural, religious, or political sense, and that parading around with that assumption only reveals oneself to be an arrogant xenocentric, even jingoistic, moron.

[kaigou]

I think the term itself is a predominantly PRC one, and the impression I get is that the majority of my flist that's of Chinese heritage is either Taiwanese or Singaporean, with some formerly-of-Hong-Kong mixed in. I could be off-base on that, but for the most part, the majority of discussions I've ever had with folks concerning China and/or Chinese language stuff indicates that most of my flist is more likely to know traditional than simplified, and more likely to give me the Cantonese than the Mandarin, which says to me, "not-PRC".

Hell, I'm not even sure someone could be in PRC and even get to Dreamwidth, but I suppose that's a different issue.

[jetsam]

I interpreted the song as them being more lacking in the trappings of Christmas that we take for granted, since I believe the people mentioned in the song are probably Christian, but I guess you could see it that way.

[kaigou]

One thing for the standard chord progression on most hymns: it makes them really really easy to filk. Then again, a huge number of hymns were originally filk themselves (in a sense), taking a popular tune and making it religious. I seem to recall reading about a minor controversy with a printing of the Anglican hymnal -- like mid-1800s printing, that is -- in which a number of much-loved and popular tunes were contested on the grounds of having had secular (and particularly bawdy-secular) origins and thus being 'unfit' as proper church hymns. I know there are at least two classic hymns that have alternate music as a result, where new music was written to accompany the words, to get around the use of the secular tune.

The names escape me now, but I guess we can chalk up even knowing this as thanks to having a mom who sang in the choir and has a mind for trivia that rivals my own. Plus in the Episcopalian hymnals it usually lists who wrote the music, who wrote the words, and who did the arrangement -- and I recall sometimes seeing some kind of standardized note after "music:" that implied it was a popular tune. For a few, it even specifically notes the original music was for a drinking song!

A'course, as a child, this left me with the most peculiar impression of what, exactly, constituted a drinking song. It didn't help when my mom made some off-hand comment about the Beatles' 'Hey Jude' being a drinking song, one that works best if you all hold hands together in the air and wave them back and forth slowly while singing along with the music. Uhm. I had a vivid enough imagination as a child, and getting only parts of the picture meant I filled in the rest in some rather creative ways. Believe me, it certainly changed my perspective on singing hymns in church, though at least my parents weren't the kind to get mad if you giggled all the way through a song, as long as you were somewhat quiet about it.

[kaigou]

since I believe the people mentioned in the song are probably Christian

As has been discussed elsewhere, the song was written for the Ethiopian famine, and yes, they're predominantly (almost overwhelmingly) Christian -- but for some reason I've been under the long-held impression that the song was for South Africa or possibly a Saharan country, possibly because I also don't equate Ethiopia -- the land where the Nile originates -- as a land without any rivers or water.

Listening to the lyrics, and then looking them up, it's worse than just the trappings. It's actually saying that what we hear/see is wonderful because we know it's Christmas. It doesn't say it makes things better; in fact, it kind of begs the question that if we didn't know it's xmas, either, would we see all this bad stuff around us as genuinely bad, as well? It's not like you can cram a whole lot into a song, but you can choose your words more carefully; the line about how what xmas-celebrators see as a beautiful church bell ringing is, to those ignorant of xmas, a death knell. (Which in turn raises some rather ironic twists about how so often, xtianity and its traditions have constituted a death knell for many, many people.) When I flip the song around as part of usual deconstruction, it makes no claims that the death knell is not, in fact, a death knell -- only that those celebrating xmas can, by virtue of their belief in a holiday, see that knell as beneficial and positive. That's what I'd call drinking the kool-aid, in a way.

Regardless, if I'm so short-sighted as to have to be back out in the next three weeks -- until the stupid overhead speakers stop broadcasting all of this overplayed tripe -- I suspect my rant will be substantially different, and more focused on the arrogance of writing such lyrics about Ethiopia of all places... but the general sentiment remains: if someone could summarily remove that song from total existence, I'd be all for that. Not sure it'd do much to remove the attitude it's broadcasting, but it's a start.

[fromastudio]

I do appreciate and applaud the sentiment; the method strikes me as shaky at best, but I've never lived in any sort of context that didn't inherently have a plurality of cultures happening and am probably not the best-qualified to judge how one goes about the process of worldview change. in any case it is satisfying to eviscerate not-very-well-written songs!

A lot of PRC Chinese do, in fact, speak Mandarin only as a secondary dialect (or language, or whatever one chooses to call the artificial thing that is Mandarin), which is something I find hilarious when attempting to converse in Mandarin with certain Chinese people from other backgrounds; I don't speak Mandarin very well, and often neither do they!

Singaporeans, incidentally, formally study simplified Chinese and spoken Mandarin AFAIK; the Taiwanese speak Mandarin but write in traditional; but a vaster majority probably speak either Min Chinese (Hokkien) or Cantonese as their traditional, regional dialects. That would be true of the PRC peoples as well; but of course the Mandarin schooling and media and indoctrination has been going on more intensively in China and it's achieved lingua franca status over there. The prevalence of Cantonese tends to be more due to the cultural dominance of Hong Kong film/TV/music, to the point that a fair few PRC people I know pick up Cantonese when they come over here to study. And of course a substantial number come from the Guangdong region itself; Cantonese is their dialect. But the world is going the way of Mandarin, more or less; which is a great relief since four tones is much easier to manage than six or nine or whatever number Cantonese has.

incidentally I did post a fair bit of fanfic on LJ in Shanghai when I was there on language exchange a few years back. so yes! I suspect DW would not be imposssible.

[jetsam]

Mm, the line 'And the Christmas bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom' is more reminiscent to me of the Wilfred Owen poem that begins 'What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.' That it isn't that they are interpreting the bells differently, it's that the bells there are ringing death knells rather than in a celebratory way. In which case, the message is to be thankful that you (in a rich country) are living in a safe place.

Different ways of reading it, I suppose.

[fromastudio]

I didn't read the line about the bells as problematic; I'm pretty sure that it's meant to be read as a "we have water, they have tears; we have bells, they have chimes of doom. " It's a situation-contrast; not a contrast of perception, and I don't think (esp. in a set of loosely written lyrics) that it's going to tie-in to the knowledge of Christmas. My feeling is that a lot of people (perhaps majority) are not going to understand the key phrase as pointing a cognitive knowledge of Christmas and calendar dates and significance (it can be read that way, yes, but it it's not) but rather the warm fuzzy feeling of 'experiencing/knowing' as Christmas. Which is where having a few more verbs for 'to know' would help in the English language, yes, but when the language is this imprecise. *shrugs* But even acknowledging this is pretty unflattering to the writer, and even apart from that, there are some really shitty lines in there: "Thank God I am not a Gentile, and not a woman!"

[fromastudio]

*nod* I pretty much read that line as an allusion to Anthem for Doomed Youth as well, whether consciously or subconsciously.

[kaigou]

Superficially, yes.

It might help, to see why I do/think this way, if you know a bit more of how I think -- when you're on my journal-design, look over to the right and scroll down. There's a bunch of links to most-read posts, and the first one is an introduction. That post is my obligatory "what the hell is going on" link that explains the processes I use, pretty much as an innate/autonomic thing.

Easier to send you there than to repeat the entire post here along with definitions of formal deconstructionism, anyway. XD

[kaigou]

Mm, yes -- but also, see my reply below for a post that might explain better why these things amuse me, and why I don't (or can't) just stop at the top-most level.

[mongrelheart]

Wow. I knew that song sucked but I didn't really ever realize how bad. Guess I never listened to those lyrics very closely.

As a Chinese-American from Hawaii, I was brought up celebrating Chinese New Year, but for some reason I never knew it was called Chunyun. I think we called it either Chunjie, or else "Chinese New Year". LOL.

[fromastudio]

/wry/ I have read the post; it was one of the things I did before friending your journal.

[dogemperor]

...oh gods, that was beautiful (in the exact same sense that I find this particular XKCD comic a thing of beauty). :D

And yes, I'm glad the humour that Chunyun is on the same day as Valentine's Day is not lost on me, either. Of course, this is also going to make merchandising then that much more interesting in eastern Asia, particularly South Korea (where they still celebrate Chunyun on the old calendar AND celebrate Valentine's Day, White Day, AND Black Day (April 14 where singles who don't have someone to give them stuff on White Day or Black Day eat black beans and kvetch about how White Day and Valentine's Day suck :D).

[dogemperor]

Yup, it was about the Ethiopian famine--of course, there are also people in the US who'd claim Dewahedo Orthodox aren't "Real Christians" because they're from a strain of Christianity that substantially predates the Catholic church, are the one country outside of Israel itself that is quite well documented as having a pre-Christian Judaic tradition, and because they tend to use pre-Gregorian calendars to date Christmas (either the Julian calendar or an earlier one than that--my sister was the one who knew the Ethiopian refugees, not me, unfortunately).

Or, for that matter, in most Eastern Rite churches (including the Dewahedo Orthodox church) that Christmas is primarily a religious holiday, that Easter tends to be treated as more important a religious holiday, and that the primary gift-giving holiday is actually Three Kings' Day (which is actually where the whole gift-giving tradition in Christmas supposedly comes from, at least according to Christian mythology¹). (Yes, you're reading this right. In most Orthodox churches, Christmas is a religious holiday and NOT the primary gift-giving holiday, and even in a lot of Catholic countries this is still the case. Presents on Christmas (rather than on 6 January) is actually a Germanic innovation and still tends to be restricted to countries speaking a Germanic language as a majority tongue--and the UK and US do count, even if English is essentially a Saxon/Norman French patois that has evolved into a language proper.)

[dogemperor]

¹ Of note, I'm not using "mythology" in a pejorative sense--I'm using it in the sociological sense of a common mythos. Just to note so the Christian readers don't get too offended. :D

[chibidrunksanzo]

I'd never listened to the song before. I just did.

Really, as a Christian, I have to say... what. the. hell. Seriously? Who came up with that, as you put it, xenocentric, ego-freaking-tistical, culturally-biased tripe??

[kaigou]

Heh. Just making sure! I've been lambasted one too many times by well-meaning folks with a modernist bent, or who just don't get why I insist on going so deep "when it's just a show" or whatever... and having written that whole thing, I've learned it's best to make sure it doesn't go to waste. Forestalls, or at least somewhat alleviates, the more common misunderstandings.