Tag: Christmas

How Do North Koreans Celebrate Christmas?

Nothing says Christmas in North Korea more than celebrating someone named Kim Jong-suk:

Picture of Kim Jong-suk via Wikipedia.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has reportedly replaced Christmas with celebrations honoring his deceased grandmother. While Christians remain a minority in North Korea, Kim has declared Dec. 25 a holiday to pay tribute to Kim Jong Suk, who died in 1949, according to media reports Sunday.

Kim’s grandmother was born on Christmas Eve in 1919. Known as the “Sacred Mother of the Revolution,” she was the wife of former North Korean leader Kim Il Sung and a Communist activist. To honor her birthday, many North Koreans visit her tomb on Dec. 25 each year.

North Korea has prevously banned Christmas trees and Kim has upheld his family’s anti-Christmas beliefs. In 2014, he threatened war against South Korea after it announced it would erect a Christmas tree along the border. 

“The DPRK ostentatiously treats anyone of faith, but especially Christians, as hostile,” wrote Doug Bandow, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C. “Believers place loyalty to God before that of the North Korean state. Churches allow people to act and organize outside of state entities. Christianity also has ties to a world seen as almost uniformly threatening by Pyongyang.”  [International Business Times via a reader tip]

You can read more at the link, but considering how various Christian groups have been helping defectors escape from North Korea, it should be no surprise that Kim Jong-un has tried to eliminate Christmas.

Army Veteran Remembers Christmas During the Korean War

Many people have a favorite Christmas memory which for this Korean War veteran was Christmas in 1950 in Gyeongju of all places:

At Taegu, South Korea, Norman Deptula, left, stands with two soldiers from the 581st Signal Radio Relay Company after they had been evacuated out of North Korea. COURTESY OF NORMAN DEPTULA

Amid the horrors and devastation of war, a midnight Mass 65 years ago in a dilapidated church in Kyong-ju, South Korea, would prove to be a miracle of sorts for Army Pfc. Norman Deptula.

It was December 1950, six months into the Korean War. Deptula, then 21, was among the approximately 100,000 United Nations troops who had just been evacuated out of North Korea. He had been among the “Chosin Few” who had escaped intense battles against overwhelming Chinese forces in the Chosin Reservoir campaign.

In a telephone interview Wednesday from his home in Webster, Mass., Deptula, now 86, recalled how frightened he was after an estimated 300,000 Chinese crossed over the Yalu River into North Korea, intent on annihilating the U.N. forces.

“We were outnumbered. The odds were stacked against us,” Deptula said, adding that he didn’t expect to make it out alive.

When the Chinese invasion started that October, Deptula was in Koto-ri, a small village in the Chosin Reservoir area, assigned to the Army Signal Corps’ 581st Signal Radio Relay Company. “I wasn’t in the infantry, but I saw a hell of a lot of tragedies,” he said.

It was a brutally cold winter, making the war that much worse for the combatants, many of whom suffered frostbite and lost limbs.

Images of the war dead, their limbs frozen solid and stacked in trucks and jeep-drawn trailers, still haunt Deptula today. Many were buried in trenches quickly dug by bulldozers as the U.N. forces made a hasty retreat.

To get to the evacuation point at Hungnam, Deptula said, the U.N. forces had to “fight like hell,” to break through the encircling Chinese forces. It took 26 hours just to go 40 miles, he recalled.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link.