Chinese Characters for Christmas

“Christmas” in Chinese is, of course, 圣诞节, but in the spirit of my previous Character Creations, I’ve created two new single characters that mean “Christmas.”

Sinosplice Christmas Characters

Character Notes: some radicals in the creations above were chosen for semantic reasons, but many elements were chosen for purely visual purposes. In some cases I purposely shunned a more obvious option (such as for “tree” or for “star”) because they didn’t have the visual effect I wanted. In the case of , it not only looks more like a traditional star-shape than , but it has Biblical meaning as well.


Other Christmas fun on Sinosplice:

Chinese Christmas Song Album [direct download] – Ding Ding Dong: Hakka Jingle Bells [direct download] – Christmas Classics in Cantonese
All Christmas posts

Have a very merry Christmas, everyone!

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John Pasden

John is a Shanghai-based linguist and entrepreneur, founder of AllSet Learning.

Comments

  1. um, john? are those characters Simplified or traditional?

  2. jw chen,

    Um, neither. If you had to classify them, it would be something like “unorthodox” or “heretical” or “nonexistent.”

  3. Awesome. I love every bit.

  4. John, good job. I couldn’t find them in all my dictionaries including 康熙字典.

  5. awww….I was hoping you said simplified then make those words freakier/over the top.

  6. Love the shephards and angels.

  7. lol. It took me 5 mins to understand what you wanna express dude. They are SOOOOO graphics! (esp. the commercial one) I was thinking of the implication at first sight…
    btw, for the commercial character, you don’t need to hang more gifts in the tree? 😛

  8. hmmm,

    亻又女

    natural birth 🙂

  9. hey John, I made a 篆书 character for this after dinner, check it out 🙂

    I didn’t use 光, cause 光 itself is 火+人. To indicate dear God, my inspiration was from 天 – 一+大, 一 in that case is heaven above.

  10. and if you are interested, the modern script should be in this way (according to my little knowledge how characters evolve)cough

    http://img409.imageshack.us/img409/8973/xmas2vf0.png

  11. I wonder if you’re setting a precedent with 3 horizontal strokes of differing widths, it’s not easy to write.
    Is that the chair that the shopping mall santa sits on? Much easier to remember than 椅.

  12. John, all you have to do now is come up for one for Hanukkah….why not throw in Kwanza while you’re at it.

  13. Merry Christmas, PJ & SS in Shanghai, China, from HK & WT in Concord, California, USA!

  14. merry Christmas & I’ll be by on the 30th.

  15. Hi, I am trying to find Christmas songs in Chinese with phonetic spellings so I can teach my K class to sing one in Chinese at our Christmas around the world program. I am wondering if you can help me. I have a daughter adopted from China 4 years ago and we are currently waiting for our second daughter from China. I have a lot invested in China at this time. I am also looking for a Chinese Christmas CD to just have for my daughter. Thanks for any help you can give me!
    Emily

  16. The last one looks eerily reminiscent of something you’d see in a spellbook in northeast China (at least that’s the only place I’ve seen spellbooks). I have one that I bought in Wulajie (it’s not Manchu, though). Translating it is something that’s been on my list of things to eventually do.

  17. Hi John,

    I like the creativity. Maybe you can incorporate both sound and meaning into your character. You definitely are doing a good job with the semantics.

    I wonder if you could find such a character in the “sunrise method” app. it would be cool to determine if it follows character spatial layout rules too. That’s the hard part. Usually the “main” part gets an “important region”

  18. Those characters are indeed very creative :=) What about the pronounciation of these characters ? Could you deliver the pinyin please ? :=) thank you

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