While Americans debate celebation of Christmas versus generic holidays, the Vietnamese unabashedly celebrate Christmas as a national holiday. In my observation, Vietnamese love parties and celebrations, in addition to being avid consumerists. They also love to sing, and Christmas carols provide many opportunities to sing in this season. Although statistics (81% non-religious??) indicate otherwise, Vietnamese are also highly spiritual or religious (at least in the south where I live). Therefore Christmas provides a wonderful opportunity to display their strong sense of design and community.
OK -- plenty of gross generalizations made here to ponder. Better to go to two sources that graphically and articulately show the response of Vietnamese to Christmas:
charvey in vietnam dislays his conclusion that Vietnamese love Christmas with many photos of a Christian worship service that he attended with his Vietnamese friends.
the final Word in Saigon presents several quality photographs of Christmas decorations around TP. Hồ Chí Minh. In my opinion, these decorations far surpass in design quality and quantity most of the decorations I see around the USA, including downtown San Francisco.
Thank you to Chris and Jon for offering their on-the-spot observations for those of us that went home for Christmas.
