I love the fact that I don’t understand the public chatter around me. Saves a lot of temporary file space on my brain’s diminishing RAM. The downside comes from the irresistible urge to listen when people in public are speaking English.

Mulling over a mug of holiday cheer yesterday, I involuntarily eavesdropped on two young women wondering where the cool place in Beijing would be to do Christmas.

Cool place. Do Christmas.

We’re usually not aware of our word choice, but word choice reveals our awareness. Running my Terminator scan on the two Christmas lovers, I concluded they were eager American interns at one of the Global Misfortune outfits in the Dark Tower across the street.

But that hardly matters. They speak for the modern soul- a simple calculus. To live is to accumulate. Experiences, like possessions, must be paid for to denote quality. The more status attached to the experience, by price or exclusivity, the higher the quality of one’s life.

All the crap piles up fast though, it does, including the tetrabytes of experience we process while we’re driving or trying to get to sleep. But the prime directive remains – keep on accumulating- and few have a ghost of a clue what it all means. So we remain busy to distract ourselves, always busy, and do our holidays as we do our work.

I don’t pretend to know whether the Bible’s the guidebook for sorting it all out, or the Bagadvita. I’m pretty sure it’s not Scientology. I just know what makes me feel warm and fuzzy, and what makes me feel bleak and jaded. Christmas commercials and sales, the latter. Getting presents and indulging in holiday cheer, the former, but not for long.

Long-lasting warm and fuzzy feelings come from giving.

So what to do when you’re invited to a Chinese Christmas party, but only to be a token foreigner? Call me cynical, I can take it, but hear me out. This year I received not one but three Christmas party invites from Chinese people who had never even wished me a happy (Chinese) New Year. Two had ‘friends’ who were holding parties at language schools, schools I’d never taught at. I don’t blame them for trying to hook me and lend some authenticity to their Western Yule-ogizing. I do have to struggle to overlook their ham-handed subterfuge.

“Your friend is having a Christmas party at his English school? Why?”

“Yes. There will be music and food. You can meet many friends.”

The third made the other two look like Machiavelli.

“Do you want to join our Christmas party?” A friend of a friend I’ve nodded at once or twice, reaching out to a lonely foreigner, digging the reason for the season.

“Sounds nice. What kind of party? Restaurant party? House party?”

“Yes. Can you wear the Santa costume?”

I did the guy a favor, hanging up on him. His guests would definitely have suspected he had hired an itinerant Xinjiang kabob seller who had majored in English at Urumqi Tech.

So now I process my mixed feelings, tinged a guilty shade of purple. “Where is the love?” the young philosopher kings known as Hanson asked, as I ask myself. Imagine had I volunteered to be the "White" in their White Chrstmases. Imagine the bookish teens in their lumpy track suits, their spectacles reflecting the Carrefour mini-tannenbaum lights, beaming as I led them all in a round of “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer”. Imagine the pride of my generous host in presenting me in Santa regalia to his hard-to-impress friends, the monumental face of it. Reality is grim, yet I must adhere to it: neither would have been a cool way to do Christmas.

So I didn’t give either school a chance to position themselves authentically, and the nodding acquaintance will have to resort to one of those creepy life-size arm-flailing Santas they sell north of Ritan Park. I’m still giving. Not til it hurts mind you, or to change the world, just to feel warm and fuzzy. I’ve been flipping the pedi-cab dudes a ten instead of the five kuai they charge to ride me home from the subway, and other incremental nonsense like that. This is the only time of year I wish I could tip waiters, doormen, and factotums, but I’m told it’s always a grave insult. So be it. I won’t be doing Christmas, but I will have my selfish pleasure of giving.