O'er The Top We Go: Christmas In Hong Kong

I'll soon be celebrating my second Christmas in Hong Kong. I've now caught on to the fact that Hong Kongers do Christmas in a big way. I mean that literally, in the form of giant displays in all the public spaces. Especially in the malls, where it seems like each one is trying to outdo the other in size and scale. For example, here's just one display from our neighborhood mall, CityPlaza:

The person walking in front should give a good indication of the scale of this installation.

Here's Pacific Place. The little rotunda has even more Christmas stuff inside.

IFC mall did loads of displays around the theme of flight.

As for the fancy Landmark mall, it seems that everywhere I went there were advertisements proclaiming that this extravaganza was created by Preston Bailey, event stylist to Oprah and other celebrities.

As usual, displays like this are the signal for all Hong Kongers to bring out their heavy photographic artillery and take pictures of family and friends posing beside everything.

Since there are all these big displays around, there's no need to do anything similar in one's own home. (Not that there is room to do so in the average Hong Kong home, anyway.) So my sole decoration is this tabletop-sized, pop-up tree from Muji, for which I made tiny origami cranes as ornaments.


I'll be able to simply fold it back up after the holiday and use it again next year. Perfect!

In addition to creating all these giant displays, Hong Kong has also produced the newly-crowned champion of the World's Best Santa Contest. According to this link, the winner, Jimmy Chan, had never seen snow before the contest!