The Christmas hater

This is the image of Christmas I carry from my hometown. The tree is always real and the lights are almost too bright.

Unlike here in Vietnam, where plastic trees blink with flashing colors, my mother has never liked artificial ones. The forest, she says, has plenty of real trees, and she has never wanted to be as stingy as ole Mr. Scrooge.

Christmas in Canada is freezing cold, colder than the Grinch's heart. It demands color, tinsel, ornaments, and stars, as if decoration itself might warm even the coldest hearts.

Charles Dickens's Scrooge and Dr. Seuss's Grinch are two characters who are miserly, sour, and who utterly hate Christmas. I am the third kind, someone who finds almost everything about the season tedious and annoying: the cold, the expense, and the waste.

Christmas in Canada is celebrated on the 25th, while in Vietnam people often go out on the night of the 24th, and the next day feels like just another ordinary day. Christmas in Vietnam is different in other ways as the air is in no way as biting as Scrooge’s icy temperament and I do not have to stay prisoner all day beneath heavy blankets and a couple of border-collies named Misty and Sammy-Duke.

In HCMC, it gets hot with a fine dust settling over the city like reluctant snow. I don't have to shout at the top of my lungs, "Dad! Is the fireplace on? This place is colder than a Grinch's heart!" Yet in essence the ritual remains here in Vietnam I linger, half-lazy, while my wife drags me down the street for coffee, watching the city celebrate in its own unhurried way. In Hanoi, people bundle themselves in scarves, holding hands over cups of warm coffee. In HCMC, it is shorts and T-shirts, holding hands there only brings sweat palms.

Ly Quoc Su Street leading to the St. Joseph's Cathedral in Hanoi is crowded on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 2025. Photo by VnExpress/Giang Huy

Christmas literature has always carried a quiet duty, not to frighten, but to remind. In 1843, A Christmas Carol introduced Ebenezer Scrooge, who quickly became one of the most famous characters in literary history. His name entered the English language as a shorthand for stinginess, coldness, and misanthropy. This was hardly accidental, England at the time was a place of cold, poverty, and social injustice, and Dickens described Scrooge in words meant to chill: "The cold within him froze his old features, tightened his sharp nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait. His eyes were red, his thin lips blue, and his voice was harsh and grating."

Nearly two centuries later, the world found another famous Christmas hater: the Grinch, a green creature who once tried to steal the holiday itself. "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch, You're a bad banana with a greasy black peel!"

If Scrooge embodied the stinginess and severity of the Industrial Revolution, the Grinch was a cartoonish, exaggerated version, so absurd that he could almost be called charming. What makes him remarkable is not the theft of gifts or decorations, but the way he captures a feeling familiar to many of us: fatigue, irritation, and the occasional urge to retreat from society's expectations of celebration.

Both Scrooge and the Grinch begin in loneliness and hurt, yet in the end they each find the true meaning of Christmas through connection and, sometimes, love. Looking back, these stories were never meant to warn Londoners or the people of Whoville about some external villain. They were written for all of us, even those who live like Scrooge or the Grinch, as a reminder that Christmas can be a time of change, of redemption, and occasionally, of thawing frozen hearts.

I have learned to read the emotions of the Vietnamese around me by watching their faces on the streets at the end of the year. I would guess that many are like the three of us, Scrooge, the Grinch, and me, not excited, sometimes even weary or annoyed by the holiday. That feeling is easy to understand after a year filled with challenges, from natural disasters to human-made problems such as corruption and shocking ethical scandals.

Yet I still see cheerfulness, perhaps because of the uncrushable optimism of the Vietnamese. Consider how they came back from being down 2–0 against Thailand in the finals of the SEA Games to win 3–2, sending the entire country into celebration.

In more than ten years in Vietnam, I have never seen that energy and confidence fade. If adversity can make people view life like Scrooge or the Grinch, they also understand that a shrunken heart needs a small storm of joy to awaken it, and they work to create those little storms. Christmas does more than bring sparkling lights to the streets. Sometimes even ordinary things become interesting or surprising. I sometimes foolishly, like a child, wonder whether after a year of many changes, such as administrative mergers creating new addresses, Santa Claus might get lost delivering gifts. But with enough love, people will not lose their way, like my mother, who always chose the right gift (in June!) and hid it in exactly the right place where she knew we would find it.

Even the two most famous Christmas haters found something gentle for themselves. I have realized that what I am learning to adapt to is not the festive atmosphere itself, but change, the vague, in-between moment between the old and the new year, between worry and hope. I am nurturing a quiet hope, a small new life that might make my own life feel newer and livelier after many years of working hard to build a house, and get married to meet Vietnamese expectations of a mature man.

And you, what are you looking forward to this Christmas and New Year?