'Tis a season to be selfless, no matter the crass carry-on

In Hong Kong, where many couldn't care if it's an important holy period or the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo, we still enjoy the spirit of Christmas. And, thankfully, we don't suffer the political correctness sweeping the world - to the point where it is unfashionable to call it Christmas at all. Christmas cards must now read 'Happy holidays', or 'Season's greetings' - trite sentiments that might as easily apply to Hanukkah or the Hungarian National Day. Offices worldwide are banning Christmas decorations for fear of upsetting people of other religions - as if Christmas is a religion.

For most of humanity, Christmas is just a time when billions of people rush out to buy stuff they don't much like for people who don't much like it either. As if that is not dispiriting enough, I recently discovered two facts about Christmas that are as depressing as a Norwegian Sunday: Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer was created for a US department store in 1939, and the portrait that popularised our image of Santa Claus was drawn for Coca-Cola in 1931. As if there's not enough ennui at this time of year, I must now live with the crushing reality that the obese and bearded gentleman getting himself wedged annually in my chimney while his antlered beasts of burden levitate merrily nearby is a complete fabrication of American big business.

Happily, my children are grown up and emotionally more mature than me, so I'm saved the anguish of having to break the terrible news. Still, I like Christmas. It's the only time we demonstrate an abundance of that uniquely human quality called giving, and make a point of being friendly to one another. What does it matter if it is more crassly commercial than a Britney Spears wedding? At Christmas we get a sense of what the world might be like if we gave selflessly to each other every day. Santa can get stuck in my chimney any time.

PETER SHERWOOD, Discovery Bay

Much work to do

This has been a year to remember for many reasons at Oxfam Hong Kong. Since the fading of the headlines for the World Trade Organisation conference last December, we have continued to advocate fair trade - liaising with officials in Laos on WTO accession terms, supporting hundreds of community-based initiatives with farmers around the world, and launching a line of Fair Trade products at The Oxfam Shop.

Crises have kept us busy. We co-ordinated aid and advocacy efforts in response to the food crisis in Kenya, the violence in Darfur, and the conflict in the Middle East. There were the mudslides in the Philippines, a tsunami in Java, an earthquake in Pakistan, floods in China...