One of the most surprising things about China was just how much the country’s taken Christmas, that quintessential Western holiday, to heart. We’re talking wall-to-wall Yuletide saturation here: Christmas carols playing non-stop over the speakers, Christmas trees up in public spaces and in the lobbies of hotels, blinking lights and decorations in all the shops, waitresses and doormen greeting you with “Merry Christmas.” This wasn’t just in the big cities, either: even tiny shops in Yangshuo and the outskirts of Xi’an had Santa cutouts posted on their doors. It was more than a little surreal. I hadn’t expected to be reminded of Christmas at all in Asia, but, sure enough, our hotel in Japan boasted acres of twinkling lights outside and such decorations as “ninja Santas” rappelling down into the lobby on candy canes.

Only in Japan: Ninja Santas!

Christmas doesn’t have quite the same significance in China, of course. It’s more like New Year’s Eve in the States: an opportunity for young people to go out and party. The streets of Xi’an, where we spent the holiday, were very busy in Christmas Eve, and the sidewalks were packed with people shopping or just strolling around. Our hotel held a huge party in the lobby, complete with musical acts, lots of drinking, and two young, skinny Chinese guys dressed as Santa. It was wild, and oddly charming.

John’s dad said that decorating for Christmas was a way for businesses to show that they are up-to-date and cosmopolitan. Western things in general were much in style: we saw plenty of restaurants and shops, even outside Beijing, with English names or French ones (Café Monet, Bonjour). One popular chain of clothing stores was even called Jeans West. Ordinary brands of jeans like Levis could cost hundreds of dollars, as they were seen as a status symbol, and coffee was more expensive than back home, as it, too, carried a Western patina. Clothes at the street market in Guangzhou bore English logos—not just brand names but random sayings and knockoffs of college apparel (we saw a Carolina sweatshirt—it was yellow—and an N.C. State one, which, if I remember correctly, was orange). I even saw a teenager in a Hangzhou restaurant sporting a Kevin Federline-esque trucker hat. Our hotel in Shanghai played Edith Piaf tunes—in French—as background music, and, along with tai chi, a popular form of recreation in the parks was ballroom dancing.

For dinner on Christmas night, our tour guide took us to a putatively “Western” restaurant in Xi’an. He meant well, I’m sure, but it was one of the strangest meals I’ve ever eaten. We were served a motley collection of dishes, starting with a minestrone soup in which in the only discernable vegetable was cabbage. Then it was on to steak frites, chicken piccata, thick-cut French fries with the skins on them, an omelet, and Chinese vegetables with fish balls. For dessert, we had apple cinnamon strudel, neatly cut into chopstickable slivers. Some of this was delicious—I have fond memories of the fries and the strudel, and the minestrone soup was polished off in no time—but the combination of dishes was distinctly weird. Author Fuschia Dunlop, who has spent years studying food in China, says this multifarious approach to Western cuisine is typical. The Chinese, she writes, lump all European and American cuisines together as “Western,” not distinguishing between, say, French dishes and Italian ones. In much the same way, Americans tend to regard “Chinese food” as one monolithic entity, not realizing that each region of China has its own distinct flavors.

Cultural appropriation definitely goes both ways. Here a frisson of the “mysterious East” can make many things chic: yoga, feng shui, sushi, half the tchotchkes at Pier 1, even religious icons like the Dalai Lama. (Someday I want to see Chinese film stars bragging about their private audiences with Pope Benedict XVI.) J In China, maybe, people feel stylish and cultured when they don those pricey Levis or sip espresso at the Seattle Coffee Shop in Guangzhou.

On the one hand, sure, this kind of thing can be shallow, especially when folks do things like get tattoos with Chinese characters they don’t know the meaning of, or, in Asia, unwittingly wear clothes emblazoned with English profanities. It can easily be worse than shallow, like when people treat China and Japan as though they’re interchangeable (especially insulting, considering the Japanese occupied parts of China during World War II). I know I felt uneasy to see Christmas stripped of even the pretense of religious significance. The holiday’s heavily commercialized in the States, but, even so, people get, on a gut level, that it’s about the birth of Christ. The narrative and the cultural freight of the Christ story resonates, even despite the shopping frenzy and the omnipresence of Santa. (This is how we can have bizarre syncretic Christmas carols like “Here Comes Santa Claus,” which contains the lines, “Santa Claus knows we’re all God’s children / That makes everything right / So hang your stockings and say your prayers / ‘Cause Santa Claus comes tonight.”) You either feel it, or, if you’re atheist or agnostic, you negotiate with it in some way, perhaps by reacting against it.

But in China, the prevailing spirit is, “Let’s put up some trees and go party!” Which, well . . . is kind of fun, actually. And in no way did I feel that the Chinese were disrespecting my religion with their Christmas festivities: they were just out to have a good time. Plus, I’ve hoisted my share of Cinco de Mayo margaritas without knowing anything about Mexican history, so I’m not one to talk. Maybe the desire to have fun, without thinking too hard about it, is the universal constant; just maybe, deep down, we’re all shallow.