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Korean winters start out pleasant enough, waiting until the new year to bite. This I\u2019ve heard from longtime Korea residents who\u2019ve experienced many more Christmases here than I have \u2014 which is to say, any Christmases here at all. So despite the growing cold and occasional snow flurries, I won\u2019t expect a white Christmas in Seoul, but since Los Angeles long ago trained me not to even conceive of that as a possibility, I can\u2019t count it as a disappointment. Even in non-weather respects, I\u2019ve looked forward to experiencing just what form Christmas takes in Korea, and the run-up hasn\u2019t disappointed.<\/p>\n
Some Western visitors to Seoul come away thinking of Korean society as crassly commercial and consumeristic, a damningly alliterative impression that I can\u2019t easily argue away. America, of course, gets similarly criticized, but there we try to deflect it by pretending to yearn for some sort of vaguely imagined, possibly even unwanted non-commercial holiday ideal. But Korea isn\u2019t fronting; people here directly acknowledge the role of commerce in their lives all year round, and in so doing, I would submit, acknowledge how much potential it really has to add interest to their lives.<\/p>\n
Take Christmas decorations, with which Seoul really does it up \u2014 or, rather, with which the businesses of Seoul, from humble Chinese-made merchandise stands to pubs with their liquor bottles repurposed into tree ornaments to grand department stores, really do it up. It might comes as a surprise to an American that Seoul still has grand department stores, with concierge desks and escalators taking you from high-end foods to cosmetics to apparel to housewares to restaurants and seasonal enthusiasm and everything, the likes of which we think of enclosed suburban malls and big-box stores as having long since crushed in the United States.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n