Eerie

October 1 is National Day in China, commemorating the founding of the PRC in 1949. This entire week is called a "Golden Week" because most people get a break from work from Monday (today) until the following Sunday. The whole week is not really a paid holiday, so most Chinese people worked this past weekend, both Saturday and Sunday, so that they could have this entire week off. Schools stayed open all weekend, as well as many government offices and factories. There used to be three "Golden Weeks," one for Spring Festival, one for May Day, and one for National Day. This year the legal calendar was adjusted to include traditional holidays, reducing the May Day break from a Golden Week to something much shorter. As I've mentioned before, observances like Tomb-Sweeping Day or Mid-Autumn Festival, once deemed feudal and superstitious, are now legal holidays in the PRC.

This year, though, National Day remains a Golden Week holiday, possibly the last year this might happen. When we got to Mass on Sunday, the church was nearly empty, save a few rows of older, retired people and a few younger (20ish) folks who actually had the day off. There were no children over the age of two, as all the schools were in session. Most of the choir and the organist were absent. We had four infant baptisms, though.

I felt like I had walked into some sort of post-apocalyptic science-fiction story, where some sort of plague or alien thing takes away most of the world's ability to have children for a very long time, generations even. Eerie.

Had I gone to the 8 pm Mass, though, I'm sure it would have been more packed than usual, and would have felt much more normal.