This is cool: last year I went to someone's house on Christmas Eve, and was one of a handful of non-Mandarin speakers there. Since I'd studied it a tiny bit, I did my best to try to guess some of the words people were saying, even using my Japanese to infer the meaning, but after a while, I just got lazy and stayed in the English world with those who were willing to speak it with me.
Well, this year, I'm going to someone else's house, but it's going to also be filled with a bunch of Mandarin speakers. And since it's happening tonight, it's too late to take out my Chinese books and cram for such an occasion. The cool thing is that since a lot of the folks there are from China, they haven't been inundated with Christmas, so to them it's a new and/or different experience. The host has decked her place out with Christmas decorations, and even though it's not a new thing for me to see them, I'm going to be seeing all that stuff differently, because to her, it's fresh and something that she never did back at home. So I can celebrate Christmas Eve with people who are discovering it, rather than those who are just doing what they "should".
I didn't grow up celebrating Christmas and never had "tree envy" or any Christmas-related resentment, and now that I'm older, I still pretty much don't care about it, but it's refreshing to be with people who are exploring it as part of Western culture.
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