It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like....

Jingle bells, season's greetings, ho ho ho, and all that. I'm sitting here in gray, polluted Beijing where it's beginning to look a lot like...winter.

Some of the shopping malls are doing their best to entice shoppers, with candy-cane colored trees and fake garland. But for the most part, there's not a whole lot around town to put me in the spirit of Christmas. Or Hanukah. Or Divali.

There is the occasional odd-looking, inadvertently religious advertisement stuck into a sleeve in the back seat of a taxi:

And you do run across workers putting up a somewhat subdued tree:

But for the most part, city life is business as usual. Of course, that business can be rather entertaining. This is the sign that my friend Rachel and I came across yesterday when we were wandering around:

There will be a special reward for the first person who can tell me what this means. I'm hoping it's something both hot and, well, heftily.