No pictures for this one.

I imagine Beijing as being one of those cities that looks beautiful in the winter only in ads put out by the tourism board after a careful grooming. Sure, the Summer Palace looks great lightly dusted with snow on those posters you watch while you’re waiting for the subway, but I can’t imagine you’d get the same view if you actually went there. If I noticed it snowing, put my warm clothes on, grabbed my camera, and went outside, the snow would already be poisoned gray from car exhaust and trampled by hordes of Chinese people who had the same idea I did by the time I got there. Also, the traffic would be even worse, if possible.
Fortunately, it hasn’t snowed yet here, and I doubt it will before I leave; the temperature has hovered in the eminently livable forties in the past few days, and if there are clouds to be seen, they’re obscured as usual by the Beijing “haze.” In a country with only two legal Christian churches (a Catholic one and an all-encompassing Protestant one), it’s hard to get into the Christmas* spirit, which as far as I am concerned is the only redeeming part of a season that quite frankly ought to be hibernated through. The little festive touches I’ve noticed are all the worse because they exist in malls catering to expatriates and are there for no other reason than to promote sales. China really has no Christmas-for-the-sake-of-Christmas, where the city government hangs snowflakes from the streetlights, people string garlands up in their windows, and charity workers in Santa hats freeze, huddled by the doors of department stores waiting for the occasional waft of warm air, asking you to give a little to those less fortunate.**
The commercialism ran particularly rampant in Shanghai, which has a much larger Western expatriate population than Beijing. Each and every mall with Western stores, and even some of the Chineseier ones, had the giant fake snowmen inside and lights on the outside, bathing passersby in multicolored lights, almost daring them not to have a festive holiday season, dammit. Here in Beijing, the comparatively few bastions of Westernization have finally followed suit. The Starbucks outlets now located all around town have their special holiday lattes for sale, the pedestrianized shopping area on Wangfujing seems to have caught Shanghai’s craze for light-up nutcrackers, and the places where the Salvation Army volunteers would stand in the US are instead populated by undoubtedly frigid but bravely smiling Chinese people passing out flyers advertising various sales going on in Sanlitun Village that day. Even in America, where bemoaning the holidays’ tendency toward commoditization is as much a tradition as the holidays themselves, things are not this bad. Beijing knows how Christmas is, but it doesn’t yet know what it is.
At least, I thought they didn’t, and that I’d have to settle for frequent peppermint mochas to supply my recommended daily minimum of Festive. So I was extremely pleasantly surprised when I dropped in at the Bookworm Café in Sanlitun last night.
The Sanlitun bar scene is a weird, weird place. The city’s first real bar area (before SARS drove the wealthy into Houhai and the students into Wudaokou), Sanlitun’s main drag is bordered for three or four blocks solid on one side by completely identical bars with completely identical (high) prices touted by completely identical bartenders exhorting you to “come have a looka!” (The other side is the aforementioned Sanlitun Village, an admittedly excellent shopping center with the WORLD’S BIGGEST ADIDAS STORE, an Apple store, Uniqlo, American Apparel, and a bunch of other neat stuff.) If you head to the other side of the Sanlitun Village, parallel to actual Sanlitun Street, you get the sketchy*** cheap bar street, with the places that will sell you mixed drinks for less than $1.50, play filthy hip-hop songs, and exist only so people can pre-game before they head off to China Doll or the clubs by Workers’ Stadium. For a while, I thought this was what Sanlitun was, and therefore I hated it.
Then I discovered the part of Sanlitun Street south of the main intersection, which is where all the magic happens. Although the aforementioned cheap, creepy bars are still present in small numbers, you’ve also got places like Rickshaw, which hosted a election-return party with burgers for all, Q Bar, a classy place with a stunning rooftop view which makes the best gin & tonics I’ve ever had, and Beer Mania, which, despite the name, is a quiet and jovial place that has microbrews from over thirty countries on tap.
The Bookworm Café is sort of a bar. It’s also sort of a coffeehouse, lending library, and restaurant (they have this awesome sandwich called the Machiavelli). It’s run by Anglophones for Anglophones, and for a while I held that against it and insisted that since it was not Real China, it would get nothing out of me.
And then it started to get cold, and I just wanted a hot cocoa. Not one of the weird Chinese ones that tastes like water and has weird chunks of jello in it, but a normal, creamy hot cocoa, maybe with some vanilla, cream, and cinnamon in it if I was really lucky. From that day on, I was hooked. The interior is incredibly cozy and softly lit, paneled with glass on all sides of the main room, while two smaller rooms shoot off on either side of it. The chairs and couches are easy to sink into and their colors match. They play downtempo alternative music. The toilets are Western-style and come equipped with toilet paper. And each spare inch of wall space in each room is crammed with bookshelves, each groaning with books that you’re welcome to read for free while you’re there or take home if you’ve bought their lending card. They are organized by the author’s last name if they’re fiction, the subject matter – self-help, current events, history, how-to – or the audience (there’s a kids’ section). On its worst days, the Bookworm is the perfect sanctuary for the homesick Westerner, a place where you can order a glass of wine and attend an author reading. Last night, it was the most comfortable place in Beijing.
I had just gotten out of a screening of North Korean films (interesting in and of itself) and went over there fairly late, heart set on a hot cocoa. I walked up the steps leading to its second-story property, opened the set of airlock doors, and went back to America.
The table I settled into was right by a real, once-living Christmas tree, branches crowned with red and silver frosted glass ornaments and set with tiny, soft white tree lights wrapping a creamy glow around everything within ten feet. Taken aback by the spot-on, overt comfort that had been created in this place, like its own little terrarium within Beijing, I ordered my hot cocoa, grabbed a copy of Lake Wobegon Days (if you’re going to be folksy and American, you have to do it all the way) and listened to Christmas music: not weird Chinese versions, and not modern pop covers, but real Christmas music, sung by people like Natalie Cole and Harry Connick Jr, played by symphonies and performed by choirs the way the songs were intended. I heard my favorite Christmas song**** played twice, one an instrumental version, the other a traditionally elegant recording that undoubtedly came from the vocal ensemble of some American mid-sized city somewhere, like Minneapolis or Boston. What really tugged at my heart, persistently, was the Vince Guaraldi cover of “Oh, Christmas Tree,” the one from the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Charles Schulz, who drew Peanuts, lived and worked in my county, and the man is considered a local hero. Whenever my mom puts that CD in the van, it means Christmas has officially arrived, stealing its way into the world gradually, behind Black Friday and the lattes and the ridiculous array of glowing reindeer statues my neighbors put up without fail every winter.
I took my drink, and sat, and read contentedly. The only thing missing was the snow outside, pristine and untroubled by the marks that humanity makes on the world.

*Or Chrismukkah, or whatever. “Eight days of presents, followed by one day of many presents!”

**I can hear you now: “Shut up, Capra!” No, you shut up.

***As sketchy as you can get in Beijing, anyway. It’s impossible to feel unsafe when the street is always crowded with merry tipsy foreigners buying jianbings.

****God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen. This is a weird choice for a favorite Christmas song; I am the only person I know who holds it in such high esteem.