Posted on 12/23/2005 11:19:27 AM PST by nuconvert
Santa hats and holiday tack; Cambodia decks the halls
Fri Dec 23, 2005
Emerging from decades of civil war and years of isolation, largely Buddhist Cambodia is embracing Christmas, at least the baubles, fairy lights and red felt Santa outfits.
But this quintessentially Christian celebration filtered through the Cambodian prism seems to be all about the party, while Jesus, Joseph and Mary have been left out in the cold.
"I don't care what kind of ceremony it is," says 16 year-old high school student Koam Chanrasmey.
"I just want to celebrate it because a lot of other youths will do the same thing and have fun. That's it," he says.
Santa hats abound on children and supermarket staff as well as bar girls draped over the pool tables in the late night watering holes dotting the city.
Plastic Evergreens, some frosted white and others with day-glow tassels sprouting from their branches, can be bought at the Pencil superstore, where a young woman croons "Happy Birthday to you" to a chirpy electronic beat on the store stereo.
Holiday-themed slogans are emblazoned across the capital of the former communist-bloc satellite where foreign influences have long been a staple gripe of politicians who blame everything from pornography to the miniskirt and Thai pop music for a perceived erosion of Cambodian "culture".
Perhaps more understandably, foreign missionaries -- and by extension the holidays they celebrate -- have raised the ire of some for their attacks on Cambodia's Buddhist backbone.
Religion itself was abolished under the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge who saw it as one of the key evils, along with money and property rights, in their devastating drive for an agrarian utopia here in the late 1970s.
As many as two million people died during their 1975-79 rule, and Cambodia's Buddhist institutions are still recovering from the Khmer Rouge's genocidal policies.
But educator Meng Ly says he sees no no threat to Buddhism in the garish displays of western holiday cheer, saying Christmas was helping his students see a wider world instead.
"It's a good idea for students to see different points of view," says Meng Ly, a principal at a private foreign-language school in Phnom Penh.
"The more you know the better you cam communicate with others ... knowing other cultures makes people clever and more open," he adds.
Hing Yan, the dean at Preah Sihanouk Raj Buddhist Institute, who has studied the impact of other religions on Cambodia's Buddhist culture, says the hysteria surrounding Christmas as nothing more than a youthful clamour for anything new.
"This is our country accepting globalization ... they will come back to the traditional path, but they will also know more about the outside world, accessing knowledge which Cambodia never had before," he says.
"It will help Cambodia enter the modern world."
Photos of Christmas time in Iran
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1544484/posts
I think John Fonda Kerry must have brought them the hats. Seems like he wanted to spend another Christmas in Cambodia!!
the Yahoo slideshow on Santa's worldwide is worth watching :^)
Yeah it's good.
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