Christmas Decorations Around Town

The decorations around Shanghai were better than what you would expect and probably much better now than what they were a few years ago.  Here are a few examples of store owners and malls trying to do some marketing to us expats that are spending money this time of year.

These stockings were in a Costco/Sam's Club type of store
called "Metro". We left our stockings in the USA so we had
to buy some new ones (not these...).

Here is a big tree on Nanjing Road - the shopping
street in Puxi.  This tree is within 40 meters of that
large fish tank that broke and made international news.

It was nice hearing employees saying, "Merry Christmas" in the office and as we were leaving for break.  I'm sure many don't understand many of the traditions of both the Santa-part and the Christian-part.

This is Jinqaio's massive Christmas cake with
parachutes.  Not sure how they came up with that,
 Jesus birthday, maybe??!?

It has been around freezing the last few weeks.  And on the 29th of December we had some snow.  It was the first snow in two years for Shanghai.  The kids were very excited since they have only seen snow once before (2010 in Boston).

This was a bizarre ice skating rink, you skated on
plexiglass.  For $8/hr you could 'walk' on this surface, weird.

In a local mall, Kerry Parkside, they had pictures with Santa.
Santa was in this gingerbread house.

Kangaroo.  I think he is the mall mascot.

This was a nice Santa above some games for kids and free
wrapping (2 presents) that the mall was doing.  If you look
outside you can see the 3-story Christmas tree.