Christmas 2011 in Bangkok

Bangkok, Thailand. December, 2011. When I first arrived in Bangkok some 10 years ago, Christmas was a footnote to the Thai's celebration of the New Year, a time when Thais have extended holidays and return to their villages to celebrate the New Year with their families. In Bangkok itself, the major hotels had elaborate Christmas day buffets for the many foreign residents and tourists. An occasional small Christmas tree with lights could be found in hotel lobbies and restaurants frequented by expats and tourists.

This has now changed as Bangkok is aglow with Christmas trees, lights, and displays incorporating traditional secular Christmas-time icons: Santa Claus, snow, reindeer, sleighs, and lighted Christmas trees (all artificial as there are no fir trees in Thailand). Thailand is 90% Buddhist, so one may wonder how this came about.

The proliferation of major malls in Bangkok, all quite beautiful and certainly among the largest and best in the world, and the malls' ceaseless marketing efforts to bring people in and, yes, spend money, have made Christmas in Bangkok a huge affair. The outdoor Christmas decorations are stunningly beautiful and rival those in any major city in America and Europe. The Christmas iconography has been kept intact by the Thais, who have not added any Thai artistic traditions to their Christmas displays. This is in contrasted to Thai architecture, which, in many instances, has taken basic and easily-recognizable Western forms, and modified them with tradition Thai symbols and designs, so that the building itself, while recognizable as largely European, is distinctively Thai.

I walked around Bangkok's CBD and took pictures of some of the decorations and displays.