Despite the stress of finals approaching, the cold front of Christmas season and festivities brought a lot of eagerness for students. Similar to how students would count down the days before Christmas break, some children used to have advent calendars to count down the days till Christmas and some didn’t.
“We didn’t use advent calendars, instead, just around the first of December, me and my sisters would just start writing our Christmas lists for Santa,” sophomore Abigail Wang said.
Compared to other countries in the world, the U.S. most definitely has the most Christmas spirited people, with people decorating their houses and pine trees with lights, businesses offering Christmassy drinks and foods, and shopping malls being packed with parents and grandparents looking for gifts.
“The US Christmas spirit is very family-oriented and doesn’t require the kids to work for anything,” freshman Yulia Gisin said. “I’m more used to Christmas being a way for everyone you know to meet up. Additionally, kids actually had to perform songs, dances, or poems for Santa, which were usually well-recited.”
Christmas was initially a Christian celebration but throughout the years, this celebration is almost the only time of the year where families from all generations celebrate the time they have together. Christmas also opened doors for friends to meet up and have fun with.
“[The U.S. Christmas culture] is a very festive … and get-together kind of holiday with a bunch of gift-giving and gatherings to eat together,” Wang said. “My culture doesn’t really celebrate Christmas [but] I think at most, it’s just parents giving gifts to children.”
Although Christmas isn’t a really special celebration for senior Zelin Long, he celebrates the Chinese New Year.
“[The Chinese New Year] is in February and it’s like Christmas,” Long said. “When I was younger, I went to climb a mountain. On New Year’s, we’d go to a cemetery to see our ancestors and burn paper money so that they would have some to spend.
The winter holidays marks the end of the semester as well as the end of the year with students coming back in a new month of the year. Long used to celebrate New Year’s Eve with friends and family because their parents knew each other.
“It’s kind of sad now [because] we don’t see each other anymore, it’s like a collapsing friendship,” Long said. “[But] I like Christmas because of the dinners and it also gives us a break from school.”
