It's a scene that might take a little of the sparkle out of your festive season. In a vast factory building piled high with cartons and cardboard packaging, workers squat on small stools as they glue together the synthetic green branches of hundreds and hundreds of ornamental Christmas trees.
Here, in a grey and heavily polluted industrial city, migrant workers from some of the mainland's poorest provinces work 13 hours a day, seven days a week for a basic wage of just 600 yuan (HK$680) a month in an industry that exists to make your Christmas special. And while you feast on turkey and mulled wine, these workers won't even be getting December 25 off. This is the real-life Lapland - the factory sprawl of Yiwu, Zhejiang province, where more than 50 per cent of the world's Christmas decorations are made. Hundreds of factories in Yiwu, 200 kilometres from Shanghai, churn out everything from tinsel to baubles to inflatable reindeer and man-sized singing Father Christmas figurines.
Don't tell your children but Santa's little helpers aren't elves but an army of migrant workers toiling in a concrete expanse of joyless gloom where the global economic slump has seen tens of thousands of workers laid off this year as overseas buyers slashed their orders and prepared for a cut-price Christmas.
In recent years, about 2.5 billion yuan worth of Christmas goods have been shipped from Yiwu annually, with 10,000 different novelty items produced and sold in the region and overseas. It is a boom that has seen a quiet country town transformed into one of the country's biggest export centres.
But 2009 is different. Last September - the peak shipping month for Christmas goods heading for the United States and Europe - more than 3,000 shipping containers left Yiwu every day. This September, the number of containers leaving was down by more than 50 per cent.
At one small factory on the city's outskirts, where workers are being paid per piece to complete an order of 200,000 plastic snowmen destined for South Korea, general manager Tan Yulan says: 'Last year, we had 50 workers. This year we only have 12. In 2008, regular customers were placing orders for 100,000 yuan worth of goods. This year, the same customers are only placing orders for 50,000 to 60,000 yuan.'