December 25 is Christmas Day(圣诞节). Christmas is an important holiday in many countries. On Christmas Day, most families get together for a big dinner. They give presents to each other and visit friends. The Christmas tree is an important part of the Christmas holiday. Most families buy trees. The families decorate(装饰) the tree together. Parents usually tell their children that Father Christmas comes during the night and brings presents to good children. Of course, Father Christmas isn't real. The parents of the children are really "Father Christmas". They put the presents under the tree or into their children's stocking(长统袜) after the children go to sleep.

    Ted, my little brother, is in Grade One. Last Friday he came back from school with a letter. The letter was from his teacher. “I got a red flower today. Could you please sign this note?” he said to mum. The note showed that he had been talking in class.

    Ted hardly gets top scores in his school work. The best he gets is “OK”, but he often gets “You can do better than this.” Mum knows what it means. She tells me “You can do better than this” means “Extremely bad” in China.

    In the USA, teachers never say anything too bad about their students, even if the students are making trouble in class or not working hard enough. The worst they might say is “Please be nicer tomorrow”. Many parents are satisfied with a B-grade for each subject.

    But things in Chinese schools are quite different. Parents have high expectations for their children. I sometimes felt that my second-grade cousin spend more time on homework than I did when I was 6^th grade in the US! Yet his parents and teachers didn't think he worked hard enough.

    Is it too strict in China? Or is it not strict enough in the USA? Maybe both are true.

    Although people everywhere seem to enjoy drinking coffee，they don't all have the same coffee culture. In Europe for example, coffee shops are common places for people to meet friends while they drink coffee. On the other hand, places like this were not as common in North America in the past. Instead, people in North America liked to drink coffee in their homes with friends. The coffee culture in the USA changed, when Starbucks (星巴克) coffee shops spread throughout the country．

    The first Starbucks coffee shop opened in 1971 in downtown Seattle, Washington，in the USA. It was a small coffee shop that cooked its own coffee beans. The coffee shop's business did well, and by 1981 there were three Starbucks stores in Seattle.

    Things really began to change for the company in 1981. That year, Howard Schultz met the three men who ran Starbucks. Schultz worked in New York for a company that made kitchen equipment (设备) . He noticed that Starbucks ordered a large number of special coffee makers, which caused his great interest. Schultz went to Seattle to see what Starbucks did. In 1982, the original Starbucks owners hired Schultz as the company's head of marketing (市场营销).

    In 1983, Schultz traveled to Italy. The special environment of the espresso (浓咖啡) bars there caught his eyes. Back in the USA, Schultz created an environment for Starbucks coffee shops that was comfortable and casual, and customers everywhere seemed to like it. Starbucks began opening more stores in the USA. Then the company opened coffee shops in other countries as well. Today, there are more than 16,000 Starbucks coffee shops all over the world.

    However，that does not mean Starbucks has not had problems. In fact, many Starbucks stores have closed over the past few years. On the one hand, this is because there were too many coffee shops competing (竞争) for business in one small area. On the other hand, stores in some countries closed because the coffee culture there did not match with the comfortable environment offered by Starbucks.