Category: christmas
25 Days of Shanghai Christmas: Dec 24 The Year in Pictures
25 Days of Shanghai Christmas: Dec 23 And the Prize for Worst Chinese Santa Goes to….
It’s not hard to see that these Chinese Santas wouldn’t survive for five minutes when confronted with the average Saturday morning Christmas crowd at a local shopping centre back home. For a start, most of them seem pretty clueless when it comes to dealing with children, one even resorting to putting his empty toy sack over his head to drown out the cries of children desperate for another free toy. Or the fake rubber santa in his fake car – he looks slightly terrifying. Personally, I’m going for the thin and resigned santa, slumped in his chair and utterly defeated by this whole Christmas palaver.
25 Days of Shanghai Christmas: Dec 22 A Gift From Christmas Past
I was given this little time capsule today by my lovely husband as an early Christmas gift. He found the box in a back stall at the Ghost market, amongst various bits and pieces from Shanghai’s glory days. Old product boxes are valuable in themselves, and more often than not you pick up an old box to find it empty – they rarely still carry the original item. But this treasure contained three pairs of pristine, never worn, silk stockings. Finely woven, slippery, and with a reinforced toe, the Hung Nee Sung Hosiery company promises ‘satisfaction to the wearer’ from their ‘hosiery made of the finest material’. I wonder how they survived the austerity of the cultural revolution, no doubt hidden away by someone who had consdered the stockings too precious to wear.
25 Days of Shanghai Christmas: Dec 21 Rich Creamy Chocolate Fudge
Chocolate fudge is one of those essential Christmas sweets that every cook has a favourite recipe for. This fudge gets made every year at around this time and lasts about as long as it takes to put a ribbon around a box of it. The thing I like about this recipe is that it doesn’t need fresh cream (which I can’t buy in Shanghai), or glucose syrup (even more impossible) and is so simple kids can make it. The fudge is quite soft, and so I have wrapped pieces of it individually so they don’t stick to one another. It will take you about 15 minutes to make, from start to finish.
Rich Creamy Chocolate Fudge
- 400g can sweetened condensed milk
- 100g unsalted butter, cubed
- 250g (1 1/4 cups, firmly packed) brown sugar
- 1 tbs golden syrup
- 100g good-quality dark chocolate, finely chopped
- Brush a 20cm square pan with a small amount of melted butter to grease, then line with non-stick baking paper
- Place condensed milk, butter, brown sugar and golden syrup in a heavy based suacepan
- Heat over low heat until sugar dissolved and buuter melted, and bubbles appear on the surface
- Add chocolate and stir until smooth and well combined.
- Pour immediately into the prepared pan.
- Place in the fridge for 1 hour or until firm.
- Cut the fudge into squares and wrap in paper
- Keep in a cool place
25 Days of Shanghai Christmas: Dec 20 Stuck For a Gift? Give a Hong Bao!
Can’t think what to get someone special for Christmas? Don’t stress, follow Chinese custom and give them a big red hóng bāo 红包, a red envelope filled with cold hard cash. Isn’t it interesting, that we describe cash like this, suggesting it is emotionless and impersonal. Giving cash in China has none of the negative connotations we ascribe to it, in fact, for most people it’s far preferable to have a hong bao than a gift. I mean, a gift is really risky isn’t it? What if the recipient doesn’t like it? But everyone likes cash! Giving out hong baos must be the most stress-free way to complete your Christmas shopping, but personally, I’ve found it very difficult to give hong baos – it goes against the western tradition of gift-giving I grew up with and it feels thoughtless and uncaring. Eventually it took a story about a friend’s Chinese mother-in-law to finally convince me it was OK to give hong baos. Last Christmas he spent ages laboriously making her a hand-made card, to show just how much he respected her and how highly he thought of her. She opened the envelope, pulled out the card, and after looking at it for about a nanosecond went back to the envelope to make sure she hadn’t missed the cash inside it. As his wife explained, she would rather have had a hong bao than a hand-made card any day.
There are a few rules to observe though. Hong baos are appropriate for birthdays, weddings, Chinese New Year, and Christmas, if that’s your thing. Your cash should be in crisp new notes, bank fresh, and whatever denomination you can afford, multiples of four are bad luck (the word for four is similar to the word for death), multiples of eight are really lucky, and rounded numbers are preferable. So 800 yuan would be the perfect gift, but 40 yuan would be like a double slap in the face.
And because next Chinese New Year (peak hong bao giving season) is the Year of the Rabbit, rabbit themed hong baos are popping up everywhere. Whatever design you choose, stuff it with money and then hand it over. Recipient stisfaction guaranteed.
25 Days of Shanghai Christmas: Dec 19 Bruce and The Rotary Candle Holder
This week he’s been desperate to give me a Christmas gift, no doubt something his Aussie mates told him would be good public relations with all of his foreign clients. But because gift-giving, and particularly Christmas gift-giving is unfamiliar ground for Chinese people, there are some very Bruce aspects to the whole process.
Bruce: Decided yet?
Fiona: They’re fine, thanks for asking.
Bruce: But what gift fr them?
Now I feel like a total heel….Bruce came all the way to our house, with a gift-wrapped rotary candle holder, and I’ve ungraciously made fun of his Aussie slang and his drawer contents. Shame on me! Bruce, I owe you an apology….to make up for it I’ll take you out sometime and get you totally shit-faced. Promise.
25 Days of Shanghai Christmas: Dec 18 A Christmas Shortbread Recipe
These are mooncake molds, for using during mid-autumn festival, but I’ve been thinking for a while now they would make great shortbread molds, giving me some extra mileage out of them at Christmas. These hand-carved molds were bought at Dongtai Lu in Shanghai, but can be picked up cheaply at any antiques market in China for about 40 yuan each (about $7), and after a good wash in soapy water, and an oiling with vegetable oil, they’re good to go. The patterns are beautiful, like the lotus pod with a tiny lucky butterfly, a patterned leaf, and stylised double happiness symbols. This week I had the chance to try them out on my favourite shortbread recipe, but you can also use traditional shortbread molds, butter molds, or simply shape the shortbread freeform. Because this recipe is so easy to make and keeps well, it’s a great fast and easy gift.
- 180g good quality butter
- 75g caster sugar
- 180g plain flour
- 75g rice flour or ground rice (plain flour can be substituted, the ground rice gives the shortbread a traditional gritty texture)
- Preheat oven to 150C
- Cream butter and sugar together until light in colour
- Add flour and ground rice and mix well into a dough
- Refrigerate dough for 30 mins
- Using your hands, form dough into a flat patty a little bigger than the size of the mold
- Press dough down firmly into the mould, them peel away and place on baking sheet
- Trim edges with a knife
- Bake for 20-25 mins or until golden (larger shortbreads will take longer than small ones)
- Sprinkle lightly with extra caster sugar while still warm
25 Days of Shanghai Christmas: Dec 17 Everything Goes Better With Snow
Is it childish to get ridiculously excited by snow? Coming from
the tropics means I never get to experience falling snow at home, and last winter’s snow in Shangai was a bit underwhelming at best – just a few scattered flakes here and there. But the night before last it really, really snowed. Well, at least for a snow novice like myself it seemed like it was really snowing, but all the hardened New England and Toronto expats just snorted and said ‘You call that snow?? Every year in (insert hometown) it gets 10 feet deep and you have to dig yourself out of the front door every morning.’ OK, I get it. So yes, it wasn’t much snow, and it arrived late afternoon while I was stuck indoors having a haircut, and as desperately as I wanted to get out and take photos for you I would have looked ridiculous in a cape with clingfilm wrapped round my head. By the morning the snow was almost all gone. But for a short few hours, everything looked so beautiful….snow seems to improve the appearance of almost everything – fire hydrants, phone boxes, bicycles and street lights all look better with a layer of snow. There are, however, some things even snow can’t fix, like the demon car-driving santa and the strange pointy-eared snowman that appeared in my lane with a colander on its head….
25 Days of Shanghai Christmas: Dec 16 Sweet Potato Advent Calendar
