Abstract:
Festival, as a cultural phenomenon, comes into being during the course of human development and historical evolution. This unique cultural phenomenon embodies human cognition and attention to the natural environments and peripheral surroundings. Festival is considered as “a carrier of culture”, or an embodiment of the patterns of behavior and thinking that people learn, create and share. Through this unique and specific phenomenon, it is more convenient and direct for the researcher to probe into the deeper layer of human culture. Moreover, the festival provides us a shortcut to explore the divergence and similarity of two cultures. As we know, it is impossible for us to make research on all aspects of festival customs since culture itself is a very complicated phenomenon. Thus, I just choose some representative and well-known festivals--- Spring Festival & Christmas Day to make a brief comparison. This paper provides a comparative discussion of cultural aspects through Chinese Spring Festival and western Christmas. It gives a detailed comparisons of the festival customs from the perspective of origin time, decoration, celebration, food, festival color, and also discusses the cultural differences exist in Chinese and western culture, as well as the kinds of causes behind it.

Key words: spring festival; Christmas; cultural connotation; cultural differences

摘  要:
节日,作为一种文化现象,人类发展和演变的过程中应运而生。这种独特的文化现象,体现了人类对自然环境和周边环境的认识和关注。节日被认为是“文化的载体”,或者是人们的行为方式和他们的思维,学习、创造、分享的思维方式的体现。这种独特、具体的现象使研究者深层次探究人类文化变得更为方便和直接。而且,这个节日为我们探讨两种文化的相似性和不同性提供了一条捷径。正如我们所知道的,我们不可能研究所有的节日民俗因为它本身就是一种非常复杂的现象。因此,我只是选择一些有代表性的、著名的节日——春节和圣诞节作一简要的比较。本文从中西文化比较的角度，分别从节日来源节日时间节日大餐节日装饰节日色彩庆祝方式庆祝活动等习俗方面对中国的春节与西方的圣诞节进行了详细的对比研究，较全面的论述了中西文化间存在的文化差异，并分析了存在各种差异的原因。

关键词：春节；圣诞节；文化内涵；文化差异

1 Introduction
With the development of the times, the cultures of eastern-western countries are constantly melting. People from these countries begin to accept the foreign culture, especially festival culture. As we all known, every culture has its own features, customs and connotations, festival culture is not an exception, so getting a good cognition of the festival culture becomes quite important.