Christmas is a fairly significant holiday in Korea, but nothing compared to their Thanksgiving (called Chuseok) or Lunar New Year celebrations, when everyone treks to their ancestral home. Christmas isn't even a national holiday here so most people have to work. This year I asked my Korean coworkers if they got time off for the holiday and they said they got two days off, meaning Saturday and Sunday. Those crazy hardworking Koreans- that's a weekend, not a holiday! About 30% of the population is Christian and for those people, Christmas is a holiday about spending as much time as possible at church. For the remainder of Koreans, Western ideas of Santa and gift giving are catching on quickly with the younger people who love anything commercialized. Most stores decorate in mid-December and leave the decorations up until the Lunar New Year in early February.
Like last year, we celebrated Christmas at home in Korea. On Christmas Eve we went to a holiday open house and then 10pm "midnight" mass. When we woke up on Christmas morning we ran the 5k Jingle Bell Jog before opening up Santa's overstuffed flat rate boxes. A few Skype marathons were poor substitutes for spending the holiday with our families, but Andrew worked tirelessly to keep me from getting too homesick and turning into the Grinch. The best part of the day was a huge feast with our substitute family including my friend Tasha from Gonzaga who now teaches English in Seoul. Game night and whiskey bacon eggnog (don't ask) made us very jolly.
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