Jenny Laing-Peach/ Shanghai Daily News 

Nanjing Road W.'s lighting is truly beautiful right now with continual showers of shooting stars falling silver through the bare branches of winter trees, a myriad of gold spangles from the street lights and red-and-blue stars hanging over the huts on the footpath outside the Bi Feng Tang restaurant next to Shanghai Exhibition Center.

My mother who's a resident of Shanghai in the 1930s recalls of the street (then called Bubbling Well Road) lined with Christmas trees, each lit with white lights that reflected off the Christmas snow fall.

Shanghai then and now is a city of lights where public street lighting has been made into an art form, an exhibition of paintings on the sky for everyone to see and wonder at.

Christmas 2005 is now in full swing in Shanghai, and Chinese enthusiasm for this foreign festival seems to be making up for the years of darkness when there was no lighting or festive celebrations. For Westerners, during this spell of Christmas privation, they managed to have some wonderful Christmases in Shanghai, too.

Family members and visitors would fly in from other parts of the world and make for themselves what was lacking in the local shops - hand-painted wrapping paper for presents and hand-made decorations for the shrubs masquerading as Christmas trees.

Christmas was celebrated in the churches to packed congregations. There began in St Peter's International Catholic Church on Chongqing Road a tradition of carol singing presented by choirs from different countries in different languages. The singing has grown and this year the Shanghai chapter of the International Festival Choir sang Handel's "Messiah" in the Lyceum Theater. Seats sold out within days.

In Shanghai, audiences can always be found for the traditional Christmas ballets of "Swan Lake" or the "Nutcracker." The appropriate cold weather is always with us and sometimes there is even a snow fall. In People's Park there's real holly with red berries, and around town there are street vendors working away with woks and black coals to provide "chestnuts roasting on an open fire."

Today there is also the ubiquitous shopping frenzy to the whine of piped Christmas music. There are real Christmas trees stacked in the now-relocated Jingwen Flower Market and in the foyers of apartment blocks and hotels, colored lights, Christmas trees, Santa Clauses, and holly wreaths offer an enthusiastic welcome to the foreign guests within.

Today there are no shortages of Christmas foodstuffs, and Shanghai's restaurants and shops groan with displays of the traditional tastes and trimmings of all the nations on Earth.

But there were years in Shanghai when a Christmas pudding was an impossible delicacy to obtain, and the small child's-fist-sized pudding in the Christmas display of a hotel foyer had to be wrenched away to be wassailed and consumed, complete with home-made brandy sauce, at an expat table.

My family some years ago took our precious Christmas fare to the local restaurant to observe Christmas dinner. To the horror of the Chinese staff, who had thoughtfully placed a plastic wreath beside the private-room television set, we set fire to the pudding and broke the gingerbread house to pieces. Worse still, in the spirit of goodwill and sharing, the Chinese staff were presented with a plate of what they thought were the "charred left-overs of the burning cake."

Christmas pudding always was an acquired taste. Trying to cook a traditional Christmas dinner in a wok in a small kitchen with no oven is challenging. Another Australian family abandoned the turkey and instead cooked chickens in the oven of a friend who lived several streets away. The cooked fowls were wrapped in hot towels and taxied to the dinner table in an exercise that resembled a scene from "Fawlty Towers."

In the absence of family members, Christmas dinner tables have become circles of sharing and friendships as strangers and visitors join in the celebration. Shanghai's expat community has given a special meaning to the modern tradition of "waifs-and-strays" Christmas gatherings.

There was one truly international ecumenical Christmas dinner where Jewish Menorah candles were lit and prayers said in Hebrew after the Christian Christmas candle was lit. It was Christmas Eve, after all and the Christians were entitled to pull rank and go first that night. Hands covered heads during a reading from the Koran by another guest and an English accent from Hong Kong raised the expatriate toast "to absent friends and loved ones far away."

Apart from the windowsill catching fire after a spill from the Menorah, it was a Christmas meal of real international goodwill and good spirits.

Christmas is the feast and festival that interrupts and carries us through the cold and dreariness of dark winter. It is the feast that regroups the family, brings together friends and leads us to mark and reassess another year. It rekindles the spirit of hope and optimism for the future and the desire for peace.

The church services, the holidays, the parties and the food, the sense of goodwill to others and the gathering of families, have all been observed and celebrated in Shanghai by generations of foreigners who have made Shanghai their home - even if long ago, even if temporarily.