Let’s count the ways --- For Chinese Christians, it’s about Christ; for many others, it a secular holiday all about family and friends。

“The Christmas spirit is awesome,” Candy Kung says. She gets to “hang out and bond” with her family, share presents and enjoy lights sparkling on Christmas trees.

    For Kung, the holiday is purely secular fun and excitement for her and her friend, Lauren Ma. She didn’t know Christmas has its roots in Christianity.

    The two 18-year-olds are drinking ice-milk tea in the Chinese-themed Aberdeen Centre mall in Richmond, where O Come All Ye Faithful rings out from the sound system.

The secular enthusiasm that Kung and Ma feel for Santa Claus and seasonal shopping illustrates one of the several ways that Christmas is marked by Canada’s 1.4 million ethnic Chinese residents, including the about 400,000 in Metro Vancouver.

    Christmas appears in several guises in East Asia. Christmas Day, for instance, is a statutory holiday in Hong Kong and Singapore. Giant decorated Christmas tree dominate many public plazas, including in Taiwan. Sometimes the displays include manger scenes.

While Christianity is harshly restricted in Mainland China, the state-sanctioned and state-monitored churches still end up packed at Christmas. And secular Santa Clauses, Christmas Day shopping and large meals have become a big deal in the sprawling cities of the Communist nation.

Justin Tse, who has a PhD in cultural geography from the University of B.C., says Christmas and its colorful trappings — from lighthearted reindeer displays to solemn church services — are now embedded in Chinese culture in both Canada and East Asia.

Providing just one contemporary example, Tse noted Hong Kong pro-democracy demonstrators were harassed this week by police for singing Christmas carols. The protesters had adapted the carols’ Christian lyrics to their human rights ideals.

It’s fair to say the Christmas beliefs and customs followed by the world’s roughly 1.5 billion ethnic Chinese range all over the cultural map. But there are three basic forms.

持平而言，聖誕節的信仰和習俗在世界近1.5億華裔的文化版圖內被跟隨着。但有三種基本形式。

One form is secular/consumer excitement. A second is cultural suspicion or perhaps indifference, with Christmas seen as an insidious sign of “soft” Western colonialism. A third manifestation for many Chinese people centres on Christian devotion.

一種形式是世俗消費者的刺激興奮。第二個是文化猜疑或者冷漠，聖誕節被看作是西方殖民主義的陰險“軟”跡象。第三個表現為許多中國人對基督教的虔誠。

Here is a look at how these three approaches play out among Chinese people in Metro Vancouver and around the world.

下面來看看這三種形式是如何展現於溫哥華都市以及世界各地華人之中的。

A．Reveling in secular Christmas陶醉於世俗的聖誕

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B）Fear of cultural invasion 對文化侵略的恐懼

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C）Emphasizing Christ 強調基督

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（By Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun columnist，December 22, 2014）

http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Douglas+Todd+Christmas+infused+Chinese+culture+count+ways/10667397/story.html