My family has a special tradition. To us, Christmas is the biggest holiday of the year. This tradition isn’t particularly special in the eyes of the Western world, but celebrating Christmas was pretty rare in Korea when I was a child. We grew up loving Christmas because of my father, who was baptized as an infant and raised in the church from a young age. It was because of his efforts that Christmas became a great tradition for us.
Even when my parents didn’t have much and lived in a one room rental, they set up a Christmas tree in their little room. When my parents were young, the two of them used to go around the city singing Christmas carols. These are things that may warrant being recorded in the history of Christmas in Korea because they were that rare.
In my sisters and I’s youth, the whole month of December held a festive atmosphere. There was a tall, evergreen tree in our front yard, and by mid-December, it was beautifully decorated. Shiny gold and silver cords and colorful light bulbs were wrapped around the tree, and socks filled with sweets and toys were hung. In those days it was rare to decorate a Christmas tree in a private home, so I imagine the people in the neighborhood were just as excited to see the lights on our tree, visible over the fence.
The truth about Santa Claus was a closely guarded secret, but I discovered it when I was in the 4th grade when I accidentally(?) witnessed my mom wrapping presents in the back room. After my naive third sister argued with her friend at school about Santa Claus, she stayed up all night trying to uncover the truth. But eventually she fell asleep at dawn and Santa Claus came again that year.
After the older sisters grew older, they contributed to the festivities by baking bread and sweets for several days, and the fragrant smell made all of us happy. We also had a fireplace in the house, so our Christmas atmosphere was quite romantic.My father, who would have been better suited as an artist than a politician, had one request when building our house, and that was for a fireplace. At the time, there was no one in Korea who knew how to build a fireplace; it was something you would only see in movies. So our fireplace was not the most attractive, but with firewood burning inside, the atmosphere was palpable. My father used to purposely mess up the ashes from the fireplace to make it look like Santa Claus really went through the chimney. From time to time, when us younger daughters would whine or throw a tantrum, he would say, “By the way, Santa was asking if you’re behaving well these days,” and we would stop, feeling nervous that we might miss out on the gifts.
I remember one instance when my youngest sister wished for a princess dress as a gift. We could not find anything like the three-tiered dress she had drawn; so mother custom ordered one from the shabby, local dressmaker for Santa to deliver. Such was the dedication towards preserving Christmas and its magic.
On Christmas Eve, my whole family sat around and sang Christmas carols in front of the fireplace. There was my father who dreamed of majoring in voice in his youth, my third sister, a voice major and talented singer since childhood, the youngest who was a piano prodigy, the rest of the daughters who all loved to sing whenever we were together, and my mother who was the only one not musical . . Together, we had a tradition of singing every song in harmony, and since we have a large family, it always sounded quite lovely.
Since we are all now married, we each spend Christmas with our own families; but I know we all still miss our childhood Christmas. And so, occasionally, two or three families spend Christmas together, but somehow the Christmas atmosphere of our childhood remains evasive. I think this is because my father, who was the center of our Christmas magic, is no longer with us.
Among our Christmas memories are a few odd stories. As I age, I sometimes wonder if I imagined them.
This episode is from when my second oldest sister was in college, so when I was about in middle school. Yura, the second of the sisters who is a bit eccentric, suddenly suggested that we become Santa Claus to children who could not imagine receiving Christmas gifts. Back then (and even now), we often became more courageous when we came together as a unit, not unlike the sisters in the novel, Little Women; so we immediately went into action. I can’t remember if we bought the gifts with our pocket money or if we got help from our parents, but we bought a lot of toys and sweets and wrapped them in colorful paper. In those days, there were a lot of kobang neighborhoods (villages of poorly built shacks) all over Seoul, and we picked one to visit. When we got there, we at first found it a little intimidating to deliver the gifts. However, children started gathering so fast, we gave away the gifts in an instant and came back as if running away.
I also remember a time when I secretly placed a gift in front of a house, holding my breath and watching from afar until someone came out to take it.
When I told my husband about these stories, he immediately teased me.
“I’m one of those kids who got a gift!”
He was joking, of course; but it made me wonder, even all these years later, how did those children feel? It is not difficult to leave an unbelievable mystery to someone. But it also occurred to me that some might have felt hurt by our gesture. At the time, we had innocent hearts, but how could we understand the feelings of those children when we hadn’t experienced their struggles?
Nonetheless, I am very grateful to my parents for giving me such a beautiful childhood.
People look at us and often assume that we must have grown up prosperous. However, between our father who strove to be an upright politician in opposition to the 30-year military dictatorship, and our mother who carried the financial burden of a large household and advocated for her husband’s freedom, we did not enjoy material benefits beyond those of an average family. However, emotionally and culturally, we were blessed to be raised in the most affluent environment that transcended the times.
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