This Christmas season has been one of chill, both for businesses and shoppers in China, compared with last year. Not many high-end restaurants, unlike in the past, have offered expensive Christmas and New Year Eve dinners or customized packages. Even middle-grade and ordinary restaurants have refrained from making special arrangements for the Western festive season.

Still, marketing managers have used available means to draw shoppers, by decorating shop windows and entrances with plastic Christmas trees and chic Santa Clauses. Quite a few hotels and restaurants, which normally cater to the rich, are offering Christmas and New Year even dinners and/or entertainment programs at affordable prices. For example, Kinsley Sheraton Hotel in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, charged 998 yuan ($160) per person, against almost 2,000 yuan last year, for a traditional ballet performance on Christmas Eve. And a mid-level hotel in Dalian, Liaoning province, offered guests expensive food packages at comparatively moderate prices.

The response of not only businesses but also consumers to Christmas this year has been lukewarm, as indicated by media interviews with people nationwide. This has made may wonder whether Western festivals are losing their charm in China.

The Christmas shopping season and celebrations mainly have young Chinese urbanites — and the ever-growing middle and upper classes — as their targets. Until recently, the popularity of Western festivals in China grew in tandem with the country's fast economic growth and opening-up. Western festivals' popularity in China can also be attributed to the country's integration with the rest of the world and Chinese people's increasing acceptance of foreign cultures. Although not an official holiday, Christmas has come to be regarded by many Chinese as a break from busy work schedules, and a time for shopping, get-togethers and dinners with friends and relatives. Retailers cashed in on the trend by offering discounts and organizing sales, creating a booming "Christmas economy".

But the Chinese leadership's campaign against extravagance and waste, which began two years ago, dealt a serious blow to the sales of high-end consumer products, including expensive wines and cigarettes, and spelt the doom for luxury catering services. Owing to the ongoing national austerity drive, many high-end services have lost business and are on the verge of bankruptcy. For example, Beijing Xiang'eqing, a high-end catering service group, has reportedly shifted to information technology and real estate to offset the drastic fall in revenues owing to the decline in its catering business.