Merry Xmas, Dear AP Reader, From Saigon!

Dec 25, 2024

Technically it’s “Merry Christmas from Bến Tre” — a municipality about an hour outside of Saigon.

But, since it’s famous for not very much at all except as the site of a semi-significant battle during the Tet Offensive, you are probably unfamiliar.

Hence “Merry Xmas From Saigon,” which everyone knows about on account of the Last Great Indochina War and that iconic picture of those people hanging off the last American helicopters as they evacuated South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Văn Thiệu from a CIA safehouse.

At any rate, what one comes to appreciate with enough travel is that Vietnamese cities (and all Southeast Asian cities, actually) are mostly the same: seas of motorbikes and humanity seated upon them, zooming chaotically by factories and sprawling commercial outlets and people in weird hats on bicycles.

Saigon, Bến Tre, Hanoi — same same, but different, as they say in Thailand.

Christmas décor abounds here — plastic trees with fake presents underneath, reindeer antlers (probably made by slave labor in China) affixed to car doors, etc. — but not out of love of Christ or anything.

For the fashion.

For the aesthetic.

Christmastime moves products, even in nominally communist Vietnam, and the kids love it.

But they don’t know what it means.

“He's the one
Who like all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes to shoot his gun
But he don't know what it means”
-Nirvana, ‘In Bloom’

But, whatever; I do appreciate the spirit of the season and the goodwill it evokes even if it’s been stripped of any original meaning.

All the best, and God bless.

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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