Full disclosure: I don’t actually live in Beijing. We have a mutually autonomous relationship. Somewhere over the horizon from where I live is an Asian megalopolis. Beijing doesn’t know I’m alive.

Where we are, is the suburb of Shunyi. It is analogous to Gurgaon, if you like — if you scrubbed Gurgaon clean, gave it functioning civic amenities and utilities, added some manners and subtracted some rage, and threw in a bunch of Teslas.

Shunyi is upmarket. Development here hasn’t been only vertical, but is rather low-rise, tending towards “villas” in gated compounds. Most international schools are based here. Hence, it was historically where the expats with families congregated, and is now a magnet to well-heeled locals with children and global aspirations, as the China “story” develops. It is well-stocked with gyms, restaurants and stores, and the sorts of expensively booted and scarved ladies and gents who seek those things out.

It has lots of Starbucks outlets, and also has cafés selling overpriced macarons and cappuccinos to the many posh hipsters who can’t get over how popular the haplessly infra dig chain from Seattle still is.

Naturally, we’re drowning in Christmas cheer.

I went to a concert at a school where the MC drew our attention to the mulled wine at intermission. This was after an almost unbearably cute rendition by 10 cellists (all under the age of 10) of ‘Winter Wonderland’, and a group of almost a hundred singers, aged five to 60, singing carols, while we in the audience sang along and waved plastic candles (included in the ticket price).

There are trees all over, real and otherwise, festooned with lights. There is tinned music in the stores. There’s even been snow. And everywhere you look, there are children and teenagers and grown women who should know better than to knock about in floppy red hats.

It’s all a bit much.

A little Scrooge-y, you say? A tad Grinch-y?

Not at all. I love Christmas.

My fondest memories are of running down to a laden tree early on Christmas morning, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on the gramophone and my mother humming along to Handel. There must be other things happening behind the happy green screen of selective memory — family upheavals and other irritations I can now relate to; budgeting for children’s gifts, staying up late to wrap presents, days spent making Christmas cakes (no, that last one I can’t relate to, at all): but all that is elided in the plum pudding-scented mist that settles when I think of this time of year, when I was my son’s age.

But here, in China, which officially doesn’t do religion — at all — where is this Christmas cheer coming from?

China is, of course, an extremely important engine of global consumerism. A mall is a mall is a mall; in other words, come the festive season, you’re going to get reindeer, ice sculptures and sales. But what is interesting is that there aren’t really any sales. I can’t speak for Beijing, of course. But out here, in our little Shunyi bubble, the stores are content to let us all pay retail prices. Which seems very un-Christmas-sy.

But the consumption out here is conspicuous. This is another point of similarity with India; most people with money believe there’s no point in having it if one’s neighbours and utter strangers don’t know you’re flush.

The big shopping sites even have social media circles for their high-ticket customers, so they can share their splurges and shopping lists. The real high-spenders get flown to Italy and the like, all expenses paid, to visit, among other things, the Maserati factory in Modena. Because, you know, it’s important to check out the next chariot on the shop floor. You don’t want to buy an Aston Martin by mistake.

I mean, seriously — you only see those outside Starbucks.

Needless to say, we’re not living like this. I make my own coffee for the most part, ride a bicycle when I’m out and about — yes, for the last time: the air in Beijing is miles better than Delhi — and would rather fall under a bus than pay retail for anything.

But isn’t there a tiny bit of this that I find reassuring? Well, of course.

It’s a measure of our global homogenisation of culture that even as we seek out the authentic, the local, the “real”, we are still cosseted, comforted, by what we already know. Christmas now belongs to the world. We can invest the holiday with what we want: good works, if we’re that way inclined, or as an excuse to blow some cash.

Christmas is as bland or as piquant as we wish it to be. Like a burger from a global chain, reassuringly the same everywhere, but with an accompanying hot sauce to spice it up, should we want to.

For me, Christmas is a memory sink, to which I return when the weather is cold and I sense tinsel on trees. I don’t need other people to take it seriously; I take care of that myself. So what if people support Barcelona against Real Madrid without caring about the fraught history of Catalan nationalism? It doesn’t make Lionel Messi’s magic any less real.

This is our new world. Most things just don’t matter in and of themselves, any more. What matters is what we make of them.

To be elsewhere is to know this to be true.

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