Christmas in Thailand

We may protest against the commercialization of Christmas, however, what is ironic is it is through this that Christmas has become a “universal” celebration. Even a non-Christian country like Thailand celebrates Christmas. A young Thai blogger tells of his experiences about Christmas.

This time of year every department store and shopping mall will be celebrating Christmas all day by playing Christmas songs and having people dress up as Santa Claus. Also when you go out, if you look around you will see Christmas trees and other decorations everywhere you go. You can see Christmas trees alongside the road or even outside the toilet!

Some foreigners might think that Thailand is a Christian country when they see all the Christmas decorations, but really we are not. Ninety-five percent of Thai people are Buddhist and Buddhism is our country’s religion. But in Thailand, there is a small percent of people who are Christian and Muslim. Even though most of us are Buddhist we celebrate Christmas day because Thai people like to have fun and we are open and friendly towards other religions.

Commercialization of Christmas is not all that bad. Here is a good perspective about the many goods that come out of consumerism on Christmas season. Even our country benefits a lot with this. Remittances from Overseas workers flood our country during the holiday season and this commercialization is responsible for it.

Here in Mae Sai, it is very cold. It is the first time in my whole life that I wear ski mask and gloves. The children sleep with us in the room hoping that our collective body heat might warm the room a little bit. We spend a lot of time outdoor, this explains why I haven’t update this blog for a while. We are busy explaining to the people that Christmas is all about Christ.

Buddhist Christmas?

In some parts of the world, Christians are enraged by the secular world and other religions' attempt to put away Christ from Christmas. I was castigated by my Christian friends for greeting them Merry Xmas and told me I was in cohort with people trying to get rid of Christ in celebration of this coming holiday. Even my effort to explain that it is not an English word X but a Greek word "chi" didn't help either instead I was considered to be pretentious.

But anyway here in our community, our Buddhist neighbors are just too happy to celebrate it or at least join us in our celebration. They do not have ideas why we Christians celebrate this day but we are taking this as an opportunity to tell them the reason why we celebrate Christmas--this is the story of Christ's birth when God became man to be with us.

I find this article and this is quite good to think about. Christians in their effort to "keep" Christ in Christmas have the opposite effects on non-Christians.

Other non-Christian religions can get a bit uptight about Christmas, but Buddhism is fairly laid back. A few years ago the city of Birmingham renamed Christmas to 'Winterval' as a result of protests by non-Christian faith communities, but as far as I'm aware it wasn't the Buddhists who were complaining. Since then, similar examples of political correctness have become commonplace. Fortunately, there don't seem to be many cases of Buddhists using the 'sensitive person's veto'.

Of course, there are aspects of Christmas which a Buddhist might have reservations about - rampant consumerism and so on, but these are the same excesses that are often denounced by Christians who complain that in recent years the spiritual aspects of Christmas have been replaced by a credit card orgy.

But in general Buddhists are quite happy with Christmas and have no hangups about hanging up Christmas decorations and enlightening Christmas trees.