Two (Western) Holidays in One

By Beth Green

It’s holiday season again.

My relatives and friends in the U.S. have already started groaning about the incessant drone of shopping-mall carols, the thought of making lists and checking them twice, and the old rant that Christmas comes earlier every year. It makes a nice change, Facebook-reading-wise, from all the election posts, but mostly it draws my attention to the way the end-of-year holidays are celebrated differently all over the world, and the way facets of American culture have been adopted in Asia.

A Christmas tree vies for attention with one of the old towers of Xi'an

This year, in the Philippines, I’m looking forward to seeing how this overwhelmingly Christian country celebrates Jesus’ birth. The Christ figure is revered here, and Christmas carols started up, right on time, in late September.

But I’ll never forget how the decidedly not-Christian country of China has unofficially adopted the spirit of two western holidays—Halloween and Christmas—and turned them into one big mash-up of fun and partying at the end of December. 

The first year I spent in China, 2006, my partner and I took advantage of the long Christmas weekend given to the foreign English teachers at the school we were working in and flew up to Xi’an with some friends. Xi’an is the home of the Terracotta Warriors, one of the must-see sites in Asia. I was thrilled that we were going to see this historic place, and while a little bit homesick as always over the last two weeks of December, I didn’t mind skipping the holiday that year.

Larger-than-life Santas for sale on the sidewalk in Xi'an.

So I was truly surprised to find Xi’an all dressed up for a party. A huge Christmas tree, lights everywhere (well, Chinese cities usually have lights everywhere, but this was more than normal) and yes—even in the city that started the Silk Road—Christmas carols. 

We toured the Warriors in the daytime, and then in the evening headed over to the Muslim Quarter (one of Xi’an’s ancient districts) to have dinner. The fun of eating Muslim fare on Christmas in China was not lost on us. On the way, we met throngs of people out for a stroll. 

Sidewalks in China can get crowded, and what with one-point-however-many-billion people you see why, but these groups of people were mobbing the pavement. Vendors selling balloons and pinwheels (which are often bought in China on holidays as they’re believed to blow luck to you) did roaring business. Groups of girls wearing glowing devil’s horns over bright orange clown’s wigs tried to take sneaky pictures with us foreigners. Small children carried water-filled bags of tiny goldfish their parents had bought them—it wasn’t Christmas, it was a Halloween Carnival!

Twelve months later I looked forward to the spectacle, and thought I was prepared for it. To research a potential new job, my partner and I flew to another city over Christmas. We made sure we brought our cameras, even though it was primarily a business trip, and asked at the hotel for the best way to get downtown. This year, we decided, we wanted to photograph the action. 

A "snow" fight in Guiyang.

However, if we thought the broad avenues of Xi’an were flooded with people, we hadn’t anticipated what the narrow city streets of Guiyang, Guizhou province, would feel like when everyone was in good-time mode. 

Guizhou province is poor, and a lot of people from there go find work in the more prosperous east. The people who stay behind work hard for small wages. And apparently, love a chance to party. In Xi’an by comparison, our experience had been kind of sedate: groups of people walking, snapping photos and snacking. In Guiyang, bands of young men were ‘attacking’ gangs of young women with cans of silly string.  The laughing women would retaliate with aerosol cans of colored fake snow—the kind you use to frost and decorate windows in holiday season. By the end of a couple of hours on the street, you could spot the married men—they were the ones the girls had left out of the snow-fight.

Devil's horns on Christmas? Why not?

My favorite sight that night was a trio of girls, winter jackets and blue jeans completely covered in wads of silly string and blasts of fake snow, holding roses some boys had given them. They were writing words on the sidewalk in silly string, and then lighting the messages on fire. They had a hard time getting space on the sidewalk to do this, but once they announced their intention, they got plenty of area protected by the crowd of onlookers, myself included. To my English-teaching delight, they mostly wrote English words, “hello!” burned brightly, and then “I love you.”

I can’t remember now if anyone wrote, “Merry Christmas,” but the holiday was celebrated, all the same.

[Note: Read more about Beth’s trip to Xian  here , the trip to Guiyang here  ]

The White Halloween

You may laugh at me, but I think that what was truly supernatural, was the snow storm we had in New York this weekend.  Worse, the snow didn’t melt, but happily sat on backyards, roses that still bloomed and fig trees that still carried fruit. I can only imagine how freaked out were the poor unpicked pumpkins in their patches. In New Jersey, people still don’t have Internet and some still don’t have power. I called it White Halloween, but the outcomes of the freaky fluke of nature wasn’t that pretty.

The heavy wet snow fell on trees that had their foliage, breaking off branches worse than a hundred miles an hour wind. 

Because of the fallen trees, obstructed roads and torn wires, the State of Connecticut declared an emergency and a dozen Massachusetts towns postponed Halloween celebrations. So did some 20 Connecticut cities and towns, including the capital city of Hartford because “no amount of candy was worth a potentially serious or even fatal accident,” said their governor. Wait till you hear the damage math.

The snow might’ve held the ghosts in place, but it surely made the freakiest Halloween in history. Here it is in pictures.

 

Dude, what's happening? I've never seen this before.

Hey, Ghosty, you look cold.

Help! I am NOT a Snowman!

 

Oh, no! It's snow!

Hey, Rose, you chilling?

 

Yo, Pumpkin, do I look scarier in lace?

What is this weird stuff, anyway?

Hell, it's too cold! I'm going back down!

The House Built For Spirits

If you’ve ever lived in an old house, you may know the feeling of being trapped in an endless cycle of repairs – paint jobs, leaky roofs, and ancient plumbing. But what if you built a house with no intention of ever finishing it? And what if the reason for your construction frenzy was rooted in a fear of ghosts? If so, you’d have something in common with Sarah Winchester, heiress to an empire based on the “gun that won the West,” the Winchester repeating rifle.

Born in 1840, Sarah was 22 when she married William Wirt Winchester, whose father perfected the Winchester rifle and amassed a fortune in producing and marketing the gun. But tragedy plagued Sarah’s marriage. Her infant daughter died of a mysterious illness, and William succumbed to tuberculosis fifteen years later. As a result of her losses, the widow fell into a deep depression from which she never fully recovered. In her despair, she turned to the occult for help.

A spiritualist told Sarah that the spirits of the Native Americans, Civil War soldiers, and others who had been killed by the Winchester rifle were responsible for the untimely deaths of her husband and daughter – and Sarah might be next on the ghostly hit list. The spiritualist advised the distraught woman to construct a house with architectural features designed to foil these evil spirits – and to never stop building it.

Left with plenty of time on her hands and even more money to burn, Sarah set to work. (She’d inherited several million dollars plus shares in the Winchester Repeating Rifle Company on her husband’s death and eventually ended up with more than 20 million dollars.) In 1884, Sarah bought an unfinished farmhouse near San Jose, California, and hired carpenters to work in shifts round the clock, paying them twice the customary wages of the time. The frenzied pace of construction continued for the next 38 years, right up until the day Sarah died. At that point, the work stopped so abruptly that the carpenters didn’t even bother to finish pounding in their nails.

Switchback Staircase

Mrs. Winchester designed the house herself, or rather, she told the carpenters what to build and where to build it. She never worked from a plan and created a seven-story mansion that sprawled across six acres of land. By the time the work ended, the complex had 160 rooms; 2,000 doors; 10,000 windows; 47 staircases; an equal number of fireplaces; 13 bathrooms; and 6 kitchens. All to accommodate a single resident.

In addition to her never-ending construction work, Sarah Winchester also heeded the spiritualist’s other piece of advice: to incorporate architectural features designed to foil the angry spirits. Sarah built stairs that led nowhere, installed windows that opened into walls or were set in the floor, and constructed chimneys that stopped short of the roof. The house had twisting hallways with secret passages accessible through doors hidden in the paneling so Sarah could move quickly through the vast house and escape a ghost who might be in hot pursuit. She kept only two or three mirrors in the mansion, believing that they provided gateways to the spirit world.

But not all of Mrs. Winchester’s ideas were eccentric. In an era when electricity was a new invention, she had gas lights that were operated by pushing an electric button. She designed a one-piece porcelain laundry tub with a molded-in soap tray and washboard. It’s been rumored that she patented this invention, though no patent has ever been found. Sarah patterned a widow catch after a Winchester rifle trigger and trip hammer (though you’d think such a design might be tempting fate in a house filled with the ghosts of the people the rifle had dispatched). She installed brass corner plates on the stairs to make them easier to clean. (Imagine a male architect of the day coming up with that particular idea.)

So was Sarah Winchester really a crazy lady with too much money to burn or just a really bad architect? Her interest in the occult and reclusive habits certainly fueled the gossip mill and helped create her legend.

Yet some of the house’s features had plausible explanations. The Switchback Staircase, for instance, has seven flights and 44 steps. But because each step is only two inches high, the entire staircase rises only nine feet. Maybe that construction was intended to frustrate the spirits so they’d leave Sarah alone, but the design could also have been aimed at accommodating the widow’s arthritis, which she suffered in later years.

Window in the floor

Sarah never explained her eccentricities or left behind a diary, so we will probably never know the real reason behind her building fervor. But she was superstitious and believed that the number thirteen, while unlucky, also warded off bad luck. The house is filled with thirteens: some windows have thirteen panes, the house contains thirteen bathrooms, and the thirteenth one has thirteen windows. What’s more, Sarah’s will is divided into thirteen parts, and she signed it thirteen times. Maybe she hoped this auspicious number of signatures would prevent her money from falling into evil hands.

The mansion today goes by the name of The Winchester Mystery House and is open to the public. Guided tours run daily and include a nighttime flashlight tour every Friday the 13^th and on Halloween. But visitors are not allowed to roam freely through the house. The official explanation is that they will likely get lost and never find their way out again. But who knows? Maybe some of Sarah Winchester’s evil ghosts remain trapped in the mansion’s labyrinth of rooms, corridors, and staircases, lying in wait to spook an unsuspecting tourist.