Mandarin Monday – Vocab To Get You in the Christmas Spirit

Katie Coy, Managing Editor | Dec 22, 2025 11:30 am | Add a comment | 207 reads

Mandarin Monday is a regular series where we help you improve your Chinese by detailing fun and practical phrases and characters.

Christmas is just around the corner and, in light of the holiday, we have some Christmas vocab to help get you in the Christmas spirit. Plus, if you’re also looking to get some last-minute Christmas decorations or presents, doing a quick search for some of these Christmas items on delivery apps like Meituan Waimai can bring up some surprisingly fruitful results!

First up, Christmas in Chinese is 圣诞 shèngdàn, which literally translates to “holy birth”. Then, if you’re talking about actual Christmas Day, 节 jié, which means festival or holiday, is added, making 圣诞节 shèngdàn jié. Christmas Eve has a few different translations, with the most popular being平安夜 píng'ān yè, meaning "Peaceful Night," a reference to the carol "Silent Night." However, you can also say 圣诞前夕 shèngdàn qiánxī or 圣诞前夜 shèngdàn qiányè, meaning "Christmas Eve" literally.

Now, what about Santa Claus in Chinese? You might think the translation would be a transliteration, as is often the case with foreign names in Chinese, but actually it’s translated more literally. Santa Claus is 圣诞老人 shèngdàn lǎorén, which means “Christmas old person”, which you’ll have to admit is a pretty funny way of thinking about it.

For quite a lot of Christmas vocab, 圣诞 shèngdàn is simply added before a normal object in much the same way it is in English: