People do recognise and celebrate this end of year festival in China, but not quite in the same way or with the same amount of marketing fervour. Christmas lights get put up everywhere; shop windows, big malls, across high streets and in the windows of apartments and houses. However, there are no adverts informing us where to buy our presents from or shops trying to ram their products down our throats by suddenly devoting half the store solely to festive goods. There are Christmas trees put up outside malls and people queue up (young and old) to have their photos taken with ... a penguin (well, not a real one, but a grown man stuffed into a big fluffy costume). There is no sign of a jolly, white bearded fat man clad in red anywhere. In his absence, people jostle and push (the Chinese do not queue) to buy tickets so that they can stand by a huge and lavishly decorated tree and be photographed with the flightless bird. Well, at least penguins exist.

Just like most people in the west, I enjoyed Christmas day. I gave and received presents, ate an astonishingly large amount of food, consumed far too many alcoholic beverages and watched utter rubbish on TV (although being that I couldn't understand the TV programs I am simply assuming they were tripe). Friends and family enjoyed the day with me (Hannah, of course, and Sarah, a friend who kindly decided that travelling a few thousand miles to spend an odd Christmas in Beijing was preferable to Christmas in the UK; read into that what you will) and phone calls from others who couldn't be here helped make the day very merry indeed.

We couldn't have a turkey because it just can't be bought in Beijing. Instead we had to choose between duck and chicken. Both are massively abundant in Beijing and don't taste too dissimilar from turkey. However, after having cooked the duck (we bought two since they are much smaller than turkeys), which was much quicker and simpler than cooking turkey, and stuffed it greedily into our mouths we soon came to the conclusion that duck is far tastier than either chicken or turkey. I wondered (for only a fleeting amount of time, there was still a lot of food in front of me and I wanted to eat it) why it is that people in the west insist on eating turkey for Christmas. It's a much drier meat, with far less flavour than duck. The traditional meat at Christmas did indeed used to be duck or goose (which I'm told is even better than duck). So why do we stubbornly eat turkey instead? Well, today I didn't care, since I was cramming immense amounts of duck greedily into my face, not dry and horrible turkey.

We had all the trimmings to go with it; tasty stuffing, fresh winter vegetables, wonderful cranberry sauce and rancid, disgusting sprouts (what do people see in this congealed snot like filth?). Once we had eaten far more than we could comfortably cope with it was time to test the elasticity of our stomach lining properly by seeing just how much Christmas pudding could be added to our overused digestion fluids. It's somewhat tough (read impossible) to get any sort of cream in Beijing so it had to be eaten with ice cream instead. Naturally we managed it but I'm almost certain that our guts (not to mention our toilets) won't be so forgiving. Just like any other Christmas really.