Tag line of recent email: Your Perfect Christmas Starts NOW! I object. Christmas doesn’t start now, and to quote W.C. Fields, “There’s nothing in this world that is perfect.”

Here is 500 dong, a bit of the currency of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, that nation’s official name even now, despite decades of various kinds of capitalist enterprise blooming there. I wonder if slightly brighter than average, but still adolescent Vietnamese boys ever jest among themselves, “Hey! Know what that means in English?”

The 500-dong note hasn’t been made since 2003, so little are they worth (500 dong = 0.022295 U.S. dollars). This one is dated 1988, so it’s the kind we might have handled in Saigon in 1994. Ho Chi Minh got to be on the obverse of all of the old notes, and gets to be on all of the post-2003 notes as well.

That’s when Vietnam switched to polymer banknotes, as some countries have. Canada and Australia also come to mind; I picked up a $5 Canadian polymer note in August, and among other things, it resists tearing. The new Vietnamese notes begin at 10,000 dong and go up to 500,000, or nearly $22.30, which probably still has considerable purchasing power in the Socialist Republic. Two hundred to 5,000 dong have been relegated to coins.

On the reserve is the port of Haiphong. I’m pretty sure I first heard of the place in the context of the mining of Haiphong Harbor, which I just learned the U.S. Navy called Operation Pocket Money.