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Holiday Greetings and the Structure of Relationships
Differences in Holiday Greetings
After living in Canada for the past two years, I began to gain a clearer understanding of something that had always felt slightly uncomfortable to me but that I had never fully articulated.
The observation is very specific, almost trivial on the surface: the act of exchanging holiday greetings. It seems like a small social gesture, but when placed within a broader cultural context, it reveals something deeper. What is at stake is not just “politeness,” but how relationships are structured, and what a holiday is actually understood to be.
During Lunar New Year in China, sending greetings is almost a default action. Whether through WeChat or text messages, people send each other phrases like “Happy New Year,” “Wishing you prosperity,” or “Family happiness.” These messages are not necessarily insincere, but a significant portion of them are standardized, mass-sent, and low in informational content. They function more as a social action than as a meaningful exchange.
What made me rethink this pattern was not the messages themselves, but the timing. They tend to cluster on New Year’s Eve — a moment that, in Chinese culture, is supposed to emphasize family reunion above all else. Yet at that very moment, people divide their attention to maintain relationships outside the family. This does not mean something is “wrong,” but it suggests that holidays in this context serve another function: they become a concentrated moment for maintaining and reaffirming external relationships.
Christmas in 2025 was the first time I experienced the holiday more fully in Canada. During that period, I participated in church activities and spent time with local families and friends. The most noticeable difference was not that people here “don’t greet each other,” but that greetings are not primarily delivered through mass messaging. People still say “Merry Christmas,” but these expressions tend to occur in face-to-face settings — shared meals, church gatherings, or family visits — rather than through continuous outward broadcasting of messages.
In other words, the same act of “greeting” is carried in different forms. In one context, it takes the form of sending information. In another, it emerges naturally within already existing relationships. The former is replicable and scalable; the latter is embedded in specific interactions. This difference suggests that what we are observing is not just a variation in personal habits, but a reflection of deeper social structures.
First Layer: The Frequency of Relationship Maintenance
At first glance, the difference between Chinese New Year and Canadian Christmas greetings might be described as “more enthusiastic” versus “more restrained.” But this description is superficial. It describes the phenomenon without explaining its structure.
A more meaningful question is: why do some societies rely on holidays to concentrate expressions of connection, while others do not?
My current understanding is that one key factor lies in the frequency of everyday relationship maintenance. In the Canadian context I have observed, relationships are not confined to major holidays. They are maintained continuously through low-intensity, repeated interactions — family gatherings, weekend meals, neighborly exchanges, or regular activities such as church events.
These relationships can be described as high-frequency, low-intensity. Because contact already occurs naturally, holidays do not need to serve as reminders that “I still remember you.” Daily life has already been performing that function. The holiday simply adds a layer of atmosphere to existing connections, rather than taking on the burden of repairing or reactivating them.
In contrast, many relationships in China operate at a lower frequency of everyday interaction. Contact often occurs when there is a specific need, or when a holiday arrives. As a result, holidays become highly concentrated points of interaction. Greetings, confirmations, and social signals that might otherwise be distributed across daily life are compressed into a few key moments. This creates a high density of holiday messages, but that density may also indicate that everyday relational flow is relatively limited.
From this perspective, I now tend to interpret mass holiday greetings as a kind of compensatory mechanism. They are not necessarily insincere, nor should they be judged negatively by default. But they do seem to compensate for the relative thinness of everyday interaction. When relationships lack natural circulation, holidays must carry additional social weight.
Second Layer: The Cost Structure Behind Greetings
If the first layer explains why greetings concentrate around holidays, the second explains why they often carry a certain perceived weight in the Chinese context.
This weight does not come from the content itself, but from an implicit cost structure behind the act.
In Chinese culture, many behaviors are considered sincere not because they are efficient, but because they involve some degree of personal cost or self-sacrifice. For example, maintaining client relationships during holidays, responding to work messages during personal time, drinking at the expense of one’s health, or giving away something one would not even use for oneself.
These actions are valued precisely because they involve a visible form of self-expenditure. The same logic can extend to holiday greetings. New Year’s Eve is supposed to belong to family, yet people allocate part of their attention to external relationships. The meaning is not conveyed through the message content, but through the time and attention being spent.
In this sense, the greeting becomes more than information. It becomes a signal: I am allocating time that I could have spent elsewhere, and therefore this gesture carries weight. Over time, such gestures can take on the nature of relationship investment. Even if no one is explicitly calculating returns, the cultural logic tends to interpret “unnecessary effort” as “attitude,” and “attitude” as something that deserves recognition or reciprocity.
Marcel Mauss: A Gift Is Never Just a Gift
If we push this analysis further, Marcel Mauss’s concept of the gift provides a useful lens. In The Gift, Mauss argues that gifts are rarely free of obligation. Instead, they create a chain of expectations: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.
Seen through this framework, holiday greetings begin to resemble a form of symbolic gift exchange. Even without material value or explicit expectation, they can create a subtle sense of obligation. If I have sent you goodwill, it becomes appropriate for you to respond; if I have remembered you, it becomes harder for you to ignore me in the future.
This does not need to be explicit or coercive. It operates as a soft structure of reciprocity. The greeting is not just a message, but a low-cost relational offering that reaffirms positions, reactivates potential exchanges, and maintains a network of mutual acknowledgment.
From this perspective, my earlier discomfort becomes clearer. It was not the greeting itself that felt problematic, but the underlying relational pressure embedded within it. When such gestures are not grounded in real interaction, but instead performed as standard actions tied to specific calendar moments, they can feel informationally thin but relationally heavy.
Byung-Chul Han: Communication Without Community
If Mauss helps explain why greetings generate obligation, Byung-Chul Han offers insight into another question: why high volumes of communication do not necessarily create a sense of connection.
In The Disappearance of Rituals, Han argues that rituals are not simply repetitive actions, but symbolic structures that anchor people within shared time and meaning. When rituals weaken, modern society often shifts toward a state of “more communication, less community.”
This perspective is illuminating. Holiday messages may look like connection, but connection does not automatically produce community. The exchange of messages does not guarantee that people are sharing time, space, or experience. Instead, it can fragment the holiday into a series of repeatable, distributable communication acts.
In such cases, the ritual dimension of the holiday is weakened. Rather than deepening shared experience, it becomes informational and transactional.
In contrast, what I experienced during Christmas in Canada felt more like a restoration of ritual. The meaning of the holiday was not carried primarily through messages, but through shared presence: eating together, attending church, spending time with others. These acts themselves constitute the ritual, and the ritual itself produces community. Because of this, there is no need to compensate through large-scale message exchange.
Who Does a Holiday Belong To?
At this point, the difference can be reframed as a question of ownership: who does a holiday primarily belong to?
In the Chinese context, holidays often serve dual purposes. They belong to the family, but they also function as critical nodes for maintaining external relationships. As a result, even when one is physically present at home, part of one’s attention remains directed outward — toward messages that need to be sent, relationships that need to be acknowledged, obligations that need to be fulfilled.
In the Canadian context I observed, at least during Christmas, the holiday appears more clearly oriented toward family and immediate community. This does not mean that external relationships are unimportant, but that they do not need to be reactivated en masse on that specific day. They are already maintained through everyday interaction.
As a result, the temporal boundary of the holiday is more defined. It becomes a moment of inward convergence rather than outward expansion.
Conclusion
Looking back, I no longer interpret holiday greetings in terms of sincerity versus insincerity. They are better understood as products of a social structure shaped by interaction frequency, reciprocity logic, and modes of communication.
Similarly, the quieter, more contained nature of Christmas greetings is not necessarily evidence of stronger family values, but an indication that the holiday is not burdened with additional social functions.
What becomes clear is this:
The difference in holiday greetings is not just a difference in communication style, but a difference in how relationships are organized.
When relationships depend on periodic, high-density confirmation, greetings become obligatory social acts. When relationships are sustained through ongoing interaction, greetings return to a simpler form — a natural expression within shared presence.
Perhaps, in this sense, the real value of a holiday is not how many messages we send, but:
with whom we are actually sharing the same time.