Christmas in North Korea: plenty of lights and trees, but no sign of Jesus

If Santa Claus stops in North Korea this year, he’ll find some trees and lights and might even hear a Christmas song or two. But he won’t encounter even a hint of what Christmas actually means – not under a government that sees foreign religion as a very real threat.

There are almost no practising Christians in North Korea. But there used to be. And while the trappings of the festive season they once celebrated haven’t been completely expunged, any connections they had to the birth of Jesus have been thoroughly erased.

Take Christmas trees, for example.

They aren’t especially hard to find in Pyongyang, especially in upscale restaurants or shops that cater to the local elite and the small community of resident foreigners. A waist-high tree was long a feature at the offices of the Koryolink mobile phone provider.

The trees are often decorated with colourful lights and shiny baubles, but none of the displays have explicitly religious associations. Many are up all year, further diluting their Christmas connotation.

Instrumental versions of White Christmas and Let It Snow have been in the rotation of mood music piped into the dining room of one of Pyongyang’s ritziest hotels since at least last August. In the countryside, where such pockets of affluence are rare to non-existent, so too, presumably, are any of these sorts of glitzy decorations.