A Shan Christmas Greeting

My Internet connection has been shut down for three days for something in the regional system, but is apparently fixed tonight. I have been working on a new book during the past two months, and have had few new posts. While working on the new MS, I shall bring a few stories from the past for your interest: the following is a Christmas letter home from Kengtung in Myanmar's Shan State, that I wrote fifty-five years ago - a different slant on the holiday.

Christmas in Kengtung December, 1960

Merry Christmas to all of you! There is no snow and few Christmas trees in Kengtung, but we are all looking forward to a pleasant time. Here, everyone visits everyone else and the Shan Christians are holding open house for the whole city, whether Buddhist, Animist, Christian or Muslim, and have bought more than one ton of noodles to feed the crowd. (Shans' favorite dish, called hkao sein, is a sort of spaghetti and meat sauce, though the spices and flavor are different from the Italian kind.) At the same time, they will have exhibits and movies in the church to tell non-Christians about the birth and life of Christ.

Susie, Patsy and Johnny are very impatient for Christmas to come. Already Susie is getting suspicious of the Santa Claus theory, though she is only six. The trouble is that all her playmates have been skeptical from the start, since they'd never heard of such an idea till Susie told them, and certainly had never ever experienced a visit from Saint Nick. Susie is also in the school pageant, and Patsy would very much like to be, just as she always wants to go to school, but she is too little for either. John, at the age of two, still takes things pretty much as they come.

Christmas Eve brings to mind the unsettling experience we had last year of being serenaded by a large number of drums and Scottish bagpipes at three in the morning. (At that hour, even one of each is a large number but there were more than that.) We awoke to the crashing strains of "For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow" outside our window, led by a bandmaster who kept time by loudly clapping his hands to the beat. Presumably, some of the Regimental Band members whose children had been treated at the hospital got together to celebrate with a few drinks and decided, "Let's go serenade the Doc." At three a.m., I'm afraid I could do nothing more cordial than pull the blankets over my head and pretend I was sleeping through it--quite an illogical pretense now that I think of it.

Everyone in Kengtung enthusiastically celebrates any holiday, including Christmas. No one refuses an extra chance to celebrate, especially one with all the pageantry the Burma Christians put into their celebration of Jesus' birth. Electricity is limited, but Christians decorate the outside of their houses by hanging dozens of lighted candles inside colored cellophane cylinders, to rival the Buddhists' October festival of lights.

Everyone holds open house. No one could possibly attend everything. One Christmas we were fed at seven different homes, and regretfully turned down an equal number. And that's only in Kengtung. We try to spend Christmas eve or part of Christmas day with our colleagues Paul and Elaine Lewis, seventeen miles up the mountain at Pangwai, and there are more invitations from neighbors there.

Many groups come caroling; some know little more than "Merry Christmas To You," (same tune as the birthday song). Others try an American melody or two when they get to our house, maybe in tune, maybe not. One group offered, "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones you used to do," and then faded into confusion as they tried to recall what rhymed with that. The older students at the school which Susie attended stay up all night, warming themselves around a fire, serenading neighbors and gratefully accepting cups of hot tea or cocoa from those who were still up.

The gifts are sometimes embarrassing. We have so much more of material goods than most of our neighbors, and are given so much more. People bring us baskets of oranges, eggs, or a live chicken on a bed of rice. We reciprocated with baskets of cookies or banana bread, and held a dinner for the hostel students. The ruler, Sawbwagyi Sao Sai Long himself, stopped by with a basket of avocados one Christmas, and our next-door neighbors sent us a live fish all Christmas-wrapped. (There was no doubt of its freshness at least). We put it in a tub of water where Susie and Patsy watched it wave a fin at them as it swam lazily back and forth.)

The more cosmopolitan mission compound church holds Christmas morning services in simultaneous translations into Burmese, Shan, Lahu and Chinese, but its main event is the Christmas pageant. Susie was in the angel chorus one year, her blond head standing out among the little Shans and Lahus, and Lois and I of course had to attend all three performances that season. The first night, the pageant ended very impressively, with people of all the ethnic groups of Kengtung bringing their gifts to baby Jesus as the music built to a climax. The second night, when VIP arm chairs had been assembled and the first two rows were filled with invited city elders and assorted officials, the pageant director seemed to feel that more was needed.

The curtain drew to a close on the final scene. Moments later it opened to reveal four schoolteachers, each with one foot propped on a chair, guitars at the ready. I had a premonition of disaster, which was confirmed when the quartet broke into a spirited version of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" complete with sound effects. I don't know what the visiting officials thought. I privately thought the director had lost his mind.

Christmas is also a time for reflecting how many people here have still not been reached by God. The thirty-year-old man dying of cancer, the boy half-crazed with fear after threats of torture by rebel soldiers, the woman who believes her disease is an evil spirit eating her insides--what do you tell them? The idea of a loving God who cares for them is so foreign to all they have been taught, and seemingly is refuted by the very situation in which they find themselves. It's not easy to try to explain, even in one's own native language. Still, it's not all discouraging. This week, a ten-year-old boy opened his eyes to see for the first time in three years, after getting the vitamin A he had so badly lacked. A middle-aged clerk, out of work for seven years because of his swollen draining tuberculous knee, now walks free of pain because of what, with God's guidance and help, you and I have done for him. The salvaged are rather few, but we must continue to do what we can. May God bless you all during the coming year.