Nury Vittachi is a columnist for Hong Kong’s free English daily The Standard.  He wrote this delightful piece about the universal nature of latter-day Christmas:

I hate people who corrupt Christmas, my favorite holiday.

And I am NOT showing religious bias here. My father was a Muslim and my mother a Buddhist, but when it came to December, we all became fervent Christians, even our imam. You may say this shows a lack of respect to the beliefs of our forebears, to which I would reply: get real.

You give folk a choice between going to work as normal, or staying home and wallowing in an orgy of affection, food and gifts under a tree, and suddenly we are all into tolerance and understanding, even atheists.

But before fundamentalists from any faith burn down my house, let me make it clear that I believe all major codes of belief deserve respect, INCLUDING the silly ones.

I have been fortunate enough to have travelled extensively and, in my honest opinion, nobody but NOBODY does (commercial) Christmas better than Hong Kong!  The mega-corporates who own the mega-malls that dot the Hong Kong landscape leave no stone un-turned, no speck of dust around spotless mall-floors and no cent in their huge Christmas-promotion budget unspent come mid-November.  That is when the competition starts.  Malls in Hong Kong  do battle in an unofficial “Best Christmas Display of the Year,” vying for the hard-earned (sometimes the not-so-hard-earned) dollars of locals, Mainland Chinese and other visitors.

This is what I’m talking about:

(Visit this page regularly, I will update the pics throughout this Christmas-week)