Even though Christmas is not an official holiday in Taiwan or China, there a lots of Christmas decorations in the department stores, and many people exchange gifts and wish each other a Merry Christmas.

My Christmas vocabulary list will help you wish your Mandarin-speaking friends a Merry Christmas.

Shèng dàn kuài lè!

December 21 is the shortest day of the year - the winter solstice, known as Dōng Zhì (冬至) in Mandarin. In traditional Chinese society, Dōng Zhì was a day of rest, a time when the crops had been harvested, and families gathered to celebrate the end of the growing season.

The traditional dish of Dōng Zhì is tāng yuán (湯圓), a sweet soup with glutinous rice balls. By eating tāng yuán on Dōng Zhì, you become one year older.

Read more about Dōng Zhì, and make your own tāng yuán to celebrate this holiday with a delicious snack.

I recently came across a very interesting website called The Internet Archive. It is a sort of library with a wide variety of books, websites, photos and other digital documents.

Of interest to Mandarin students is a Mandarin Primer published in 1911 by a religious organization called The China Inland Mission.

Many of the lessons have a religious theme, such as A Selection of Moral and Religious Terms and Forms of Prayer, but a good portion of the book also covers general vocabulary.

The Romanization seems to be Wade-Giles, and the tones are indicated on the Chinese characters, not the Romanization. The preface talks about the Mandarin tones:

...They give character to the speech and sharply differentiate a speaker who uses them from one who neglects them.

Tones give a bit more than character, but I find this explanation charming in a way, as is the whole textbook.

If you've ever wanted to Twitter in Mandarin only to find it doesn't support Chinese, now you have Yahoo Meme to try out.

What is Meme? According to Yahoo, "Meme is where you share everything you find that's interesting". That doesn't really tell us much, but I've heard it described as a "microblogging platform," so I guess that means it's a Twitter clone.

Meme is available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, and Chinese.