No need to overreact to Christmas craze

College students wearing traditional Chinese clothing join a campaign to boycott Christmas celebrations on a street in Changsha, Central China's Hunan province on December 24, 2014. [Photo: China News Service/ Yang Huafeng] 

So huge that it has made some people nervous.

On Christmas Eve, a college in a northwestern university organized a compulsory film-watching session to prevent students from leaving campus and celebrating the foreign festival.

In Wenzhou, a prosperous manufacturing hub in East China's Zhejiang province, education authorities told local schools that no Christmas-related celebrations should be held on campus.

On the Web, some young women dressed in traditional Chinese costumes protested the popularity of the Western holiday.

The northwestern college wanted to "safeguard traditional culture".The Wenzhou authorities didn't really explain why though guesses cite security. The posters in the hands of the young ladies echoed cultural worries.

This we have seen and heard all these years.

Yet nothing prevented Beijing from becoming "an outdoor parking lot" at rush hour on Wednesday; or bothered the young men and women who had fun in the name of Christmas.

But there is no need to be alarmed. Because, huge as it may be, Christmas is nothing to worry about.

Not only because Christianity has never been a religious mainstream here. But, except for the carols and mid night mass at Christian churches, the Christmas craze here has little to do with religion or spirituality.

On the contrary, it is merely another symbol of Chinese consumerism.

That the Chinese populace is beginning to consume Christmas decorations they used to make for Westerners does not mean they have found Jesus.

We see Santa Claus and Christmas decorations, and have earfuls of Jingle Bells long before Christmas. And almost invariably at shopping venues. To businesses, Christmas is no different than the artificial "Single's Day" on Nov 11, something they invented years ago to create a spending spree.

Christmas' recent popularity with the country's younger generations has little to do with Christianity. One may find plenty of youthful faces at Christian churches on Christmas Eve. Yet few are churchgoers at other times. Whatever one chooses to believe, our materialistic youth are still overwhelmingly atheist.

They love Christmas not because they love Jesus, but because it gives them one more excuse to hang out with loved ones, and to entertain and reward themselves.

Like many have correctly observed, Christmas, an all important Christian holiday, has been thoroughly transformed here. And the localized Christmas is hardly about Christianity. It is more like an annual carnival for the young and well-to-do.

Because of that, the authorities may want to embrace it as a precious driver of domestic demand.