Christmas Outside the Mold

I think it is safe to say our entire campus looks forward to Christmas. Christmas is the time when we return to our families, when we celebrate the birth of Christ, and when we don’t have to study. Christmas means cards from old friends and gifts piled under the Christmas tree. Christmas is sugar cookies and peppermint and gingerbread men. All of this is true for virtually everyone on campus, because virtually everyone on campus is Christian. The key word is virtually. What does Christmas mean if you don’t fit the same mold as everyone else on campus?

Case in point: Huong is a sophomore studying marketing here at BYU. She is Vietnamese and non-religious; at BYU, this definitely makes her part of a very small minority. She doesn’t fit the mold of the rest of BYU’s 30,000 students, so how does this change Christmas for her?

She doesn’t know. Yes, Christmas is a fun time and a welcome break between two semesters of hard studying. But it also means that she is alone for the entire break. Does Christmas mean spending time with her family? Of course not. Her family is 8,000 miles away. Does Christmas mean cards and gifts? Not really—that is a Western custom. Does Christmas mean celebrating the birth of a Savior? She doesn’t view Christ as her Savior. Christmas means a few gifts and hanging out with a few close friends from the Vietnamese community. This is what Christmas means to her now, and that is considerably better than her first Christmas as a new student. Christmas her first year meant being alone in a foreign country with strange customs, different beliefs and no family to make it easier. I guess things like Christmas aren’t as universal as we might think.