Welcome to China, Have a Christmas Eve Apple

An apple, along with several small boxes (the size to hold an individual apple). The boxes have images of Santa and Christmas trees and the words "平安果" (which I will translate as "Christmas Eve apple"). Image source.

Merry Christmas Eve everyone! On Friday at work, the company gave us all Christmas Eve apples. This is a tradition in China. Let me tell you about it.

First of all, you need to know that Chinese culture LOVES puns. For Chinese New Year, it's common to see decorations which have the character 福[fú] (which means happiness/ blessing/ good fortune) upside-down, because 福倒了[fú dào le] ("fu is upside-down") sounds like 福到了[fú dào le] ("happiness/ good fortune has come"). Every year has a different animal associated with it- when we were celebrating the year of the horse in 2014, there were puns EVERYWHERE about 马上[mǎ shàng], which means "about to happen" but if you take each character literally it means "on a horse." People would stick some money on a toy horse and be like "马上有钱" [mǎ shàng yǒu qián] which means either "money on a horse" or "getting money soon." And there are 12 different zodiac animals- new puns every year.

4 is an unlucky number because it's pronounced 四[sì] which sounds like 死[sǐ] which means death. And May 20 is a sort of unofficial Valentine's Day because 520 is 五二零[wǔ èr líng] which sounds like 我爱你[wǒ ài nǐ] which means "I love you." (Please note, though, that Hendrix thinks this 520 business is just silly, it's only been a thing for maybe 10 years, possibly made popular by the internet, whereas these other puns go way back to ancient China.)

My point is, Chinese culture loves puns.

And that brings us to Christmas Eve. In Chinese, Christmas Eve is called 平安夜[píng ān yè], which means "peaceful night" or maybe to get across the Christmassy meaning we should translate it as "silent night." And "apple" in Chinese is 苹果[píng guǒ]. So you see where this is going, right?

Anyway, so, you can buy apples individually packaged in cute little Christmas boxes. It is ADORABLE.

I searched the [English side of the] internet to see if I could find out when this tradition started. Found a bunch of articles about the fact that the Christmas Eve apple tradition exists, but nothing more detailed than what I've written in this post. But Hendrix guesses it started maybe about 10 years ago.

Merry Christmas Eve, and enjoy your apples~