Christmas, Lost and Remembered

As a child growing up in poor rural Hong Kong, Christmas was the big festival I looked forward to all year long and enjoyed through all my primary school years.  The apparently interminable mundane and boring school life all of a sudden got interrupted.  A nice pretty school girl got to pretend to be Mary looking radiant and serene while cradling a plastic baby doll wrapped in a blanket, a well behaved school boy got to play Joseph, the bland carpenter; and lesser boys and girls got to be a scholar or a sheep or even a tree.  The actual performance was fun but so were the endless rehearsals before the big day.  I wasn't much of a performer myself as I don't recall playing any characters in Nativity, I might have a bit part in singing reserved for the less lessor kids. But I guess I just enjoyed the spectacle and the chaos that was our Christmas party.  I remember there would always be that magic show from the Chus Magic Troupe and the magician and his assistant always seriously made sure there were nobody, us kids included, looking from the side or in the back, because nobody should know their ultra secretive and stupid rope trick or card trick except themselves.  And the obligatory Christmas boring speech from somebody high up in the church who had the good grace to come to see us perform in our make-shift stage and auditorium.  One (or every) year the church dude in funny robe and outlandish attire got particular annoyed by kids backstage.  Oh well, loosen up it was Christmas time.  The whole assembly hall was done by removing the partitions between classrooms and the stage was desks pushed together to one end.  Hey you had an auditorium right there.  I remember the teacher in charge, Fatty Som, always favored one kid and put him in charge of the project--he's a pilot now, I being one of the lesser kids would labor to push the desks together and received the underserved scorn should anything go mildly awry--Fatty was not always jolly.  No performers fell off the desks-pushed-together stage ever.  So we actually had a solid safety record, it was actually a minor miracle compared to how often mega stars fall off the stage injured or died prematurely.  The stage would have been a much safer place only if I were a stage manager.

After the big party all the pupils got their Christmas in a bag: a purple cellophane goody bag full of candies and carefully tied with a little tiny curly colored ribbon.  Please I want my purple cellophane Christmas goody bag (i.e. in addition to all the iStuff from Apple).

Merry Christmas, to all the Gentiles, out there.