Santa's New Elves

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Santa's workshop is anything but shipshape: sacks of bell-shaped ornaments cascade from tabletops, plastic buckets leak cartoon-colored chemicals onto the cement floor, and scattered tinsel is everywhere. Ding Hangjuan, a 43-year-old former peasant, kicks through the Yuletide wreckage. Ding set up her ornament factory in an abandoned schoolhouse six years ago to manufacture decorations for Christmas trees in the U.S. This year, Ding's 400 workers labored overtime to supply a brand-new market. "My buyers were once foreigners, but now 10% of what I make stays here in China," she says.

Ding's prosperity is shared with just about everyone living in Yiwu, China's very own North Pole. Thousands of vendors offer whirling Christmas trees with glowing fiber-optic needles, chicken-feather angel wings and that traditional favorite without which no holiday living room is complete: the plastic statuette of Santa playing electric guitar on the moon. All this might have confused Chinese consumers a few years ago, but Yiwu is feeding a ravenous demand by mainland consumers who think that the height of contemporary urbanity is to festoon the living room in December. "I'd always heard of Christmas but never celebrated it," says Wang Hui, who came to Yiwu looking for factory work. "On Christmas Eve, when the stringed lights go on, I'll walk downtown with my girlfriends and shop for gifts."

This trend once alarmed China's Communist leadership. In 1993, the government banned public Christmas celebrations (as well as those for Easter and April Fools' Day). These days, the government has backed off and sees benefit in consumer-led economic growth. That translates into blinking lights and plastic wreaths for anyone who can afford them, and lots of waitresses dressed in Santa's red-and-whites that show a bit of leg. (Nativity scenes and other overtly religious displays are still forbidden by government decree.) Some restaurants in Beijing offer $300-a-plate Christmas dinners that newspapers deride as "money-burning meals." All over China, department stores run Christmas sales and cardboard Santas peer from shop windows.

At Yiwu's main intersection, the Vivi Bright Wedding Photo Studio has installed fake evergreens, mounds of Styrofoam pellets masquerading as snow, and a white picket fence outside its storefront. "People want their wedding pictures in front of a Christmas tree because Christmas is modern," explains Hu Hanbang, the studio's manager. Hu plans to dress as St. Nick on Christmas Eve and give away picture frames in red envelopes of the sort that Chinese distribute over Lunar New Year.

For a holiday with such a commercial element, there are intriguing signs that the deeper meaning of Christmas is spreading in China. Yiwu, in coastal Zhejiang province, is home to half a million migrant workers from the country's poorest reaches. Many of them have become curious about Christmas, says an elder at Yiwu's main Protestant church. Last year, 30,000 people attended Christmas Eve services in a church with pews seating only 7,000, so the minister set up loudspeakers in the churchyard. At the end, he asked how many first-timers would consider joining the church. "Hands went up everywhere," the elder says.

At her factory, Ding Hangjuan considers herself an expert in holiday paraphernalia. She's gleaned some of her designs from Hollywood movies, copied others from competitors, and learned a thing or two about her overseas buyers along the way. "Americans don't like images of Jesus in pain," she notes. "They prefer symbols of good luck, like angels and five-pointed stars." And although she doesn't quite say it, she thinks American revelers are a bit dim. Case in point: among her big sellers this year is a red bow with a tiny pinecone in the middle. She had paid peasants 60¢ a kilo to collect the cones for her, making a tidy profit when she sold them. In China, the merchants are having the merriest Christmas.