Peace, at Year's End | Christmas 2025
The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. May His peace find you this Christmastide.
When I was young, my family never celebrated Christmas. “It’s not Asian,” they would say.
“It’s just a commercial holiday, it’s meaningless.” And rightfully so, as early as November, way before Thanksgiving, malls, restaurants and brands would descend into a promotion of Christmas Inc. Artificial mall trees, Orchard Road lit up in sponsored cheer, turkeys in full promotion across hotel and supermarket menus, jingles looping on repeat. A season engineered for consumption. Instead, we marked time with Chinese festivals: Lunar New Year, Mid-Autumn, Dongzhi (Winter Solstice); holidays rooted in cycles of nature, ancestry, and Asian rituals.
But growing up, I watched Christmas from a different lens. Movies like Home Alone, and Miracle on 34th Street: towns dusted with snow, a season that promised nothing but love and happiness, a quiet hope for something miraculous and gentle redemption. Between those formative years and adulthood, I found myself yearning — not for the spectacle of Christmas, but for the feeling those films suggested.
Last year, while I was in San Francisco for FMTY in November, I also spent Thanksgiving with an old friend. Two days after we had thoroughly stuffed ourselves on turkey, she took me to a nursery to pick out a noble fir for her home. We wandered between rows of trees, surrounded by families and their excited children, each negotiating over the perfect one to bring back. The air was thick with the piney scent of fir. There was something quietly magical about it, about this final stretch of the year leading up to Christmas, when people seem, almost without trying, a little softer, a little lighter, and kinder to one another.
This year, I decided to do the same. I went down to a nursery with Domina Delilah and brought ourselves a noble fir home. One December evening, we gathered with our loved ones, stringing fairy lights and hanging ornaments, cozying up with mugs of mulled wine. In the nights that followed, I found myself lounging by the tree with friends and after sessions with subs — sometimes with a glass of wine, over Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker humming in the background, though I’d prefer Christmas Eve/Sarajevo by Trans-Siberian Orchestra. We chatted about the year that had passed, our happiest moments, what had been lost, what had endured, and what, quietly, had been enough.
I’ve come to realise that the most meaningful festivities aren’t inherited or prescribed by ancestry or race. They’re made — assembled slowly, imperfectly — out of presence, tenderness, and the people we love and those who choose to sit beside us as the year draws to a close.
Wherever this season finds you, I hope you have warmth, gentleness, and at least one person to come home to. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
Christmas 2024, a year in review: here