A few winters back I spent some December days in the cities of Southeast Asia. Not far from the storied Raffles Hotel in Singapore, there is a city block with Buddhist temples alongside a mosque and a Christian church, with a Hindu temple and a synagogue not far away.

The city’s population is mainly Chinese, hence Buddhist or Taoist, but it is a notably cosmopolitan city – about one in six people, according to the 2010 census, is of Christian denomination.

But if you think the commercialisation of Christmas has gone a little too far in Christian Europe, Singapore illustrates that you don’t need Christians to have a retailing blow-out in December.

The whole European mid-winter festival is available in the tropics (Singapore is almost bang on the Equator), including Bing Crosby’s Jingle Bells blasting out in every shopping mall and department store, plastic snowmen, sales staff in red bonnets and lavishly decorated trees.

There are even fewer Christians in Kuala Lumpur, capital of mainly Islamic Malaysia, but the bells were jingling there too, as they were in the cities of Thailand, where most people are Buddhist.

The commercial version of Christmas, without any religious connotations, has spread to the Middle East and is increasingly evident in China, Korea and Japan.

Originally a Northern European phenomenon (that’s where the pine trees came from) some of the modern Christmas rituals are a lot more recent than you might imagine. For one thing the ‘traditional’ red-robed and white-bearded Santa was invented around 1930 by the Coca Cola corporation for its newspaper advertising.

Of course, it is no accident that Northern Europeans marked the winter solstice and there is plenty of evidence of mid-winter rituals stretching back to pre-Christian times.

For the subsistence agricultural societies of the ancient world winter must have been a scary time, an ordeal to be survived and the end of the shortening days, the promise of spring, an event to be celebrated.

In its early time, the Christian church adapted many pre-existing customs and this is clearly one of them. But Bing Crosby in the tropics is a bit of a stretch.

Curiously, there are parts of Catholic Europe where Christmas is less ‘in your face’. In southern Italy, for example, it is just another public holiday and pretty low-key. The same is true in much of Latin America.

There are now non-Christian societies where Christmas is becoming a bigger deal. What is going on here is pretty obvious. Retail is becoming a part of the entertainment industry and needs to be event-driven. Rising income levels around the world have globalised retailing and the Western version of Christmas has been exported.

While some people lament the commercialisation of what is supposedly a religious festival, it should be seen as just another manifestation of the decline in religious faith and the secularisation of society.

But there is a purely practical objection to the way the Irish Christmas has developed in the last few decades. There is now a virtual shut-down of many businesses and public services stretching from Christmas Eve into the early days of January, an unofficial mid-winter vacation period that can run up to 10 days, or more depending on the dates of the official public holidays.

There are just three official public holidays around Christmas in Ireland, 25 and 26 December and 1 January. It appears to have become standard practice now to spin these into a much longer break for those with indulgent employers.

This is a recent phenomenon and it seems to be particularly widespread in this country. In the United States, most people will be back at work on 26 December, believe it or not.

A further unfortunate feature of the modern commercial Christmas, and it is nothing new, is the temptation for low-income households to overspend. There must be many parents facing the peer-pressure on their offspring to find the money for the latest fad in toys, clothing or electronic gadgets. This goes on all year round of course, but is particularly intense at this time of year. The unfortunate decline in charitable donations after the recent scandals in a small number of charities will exacerbate the problem this year.

It is worth noting that no issues have arisen at the vast majority of Irish charities, which depend on Christmas donations for much of their income.

The spreading attractions of the Western Christmas around the world can seem pretty harmless, a consequence of prosperity.

Indeed the embrace of a Christian festival in non-Christian societies is evidence of cultural tolerance, a world less divided.

But there are more attractive cultural exports: Christmas is fast becoming the annual Holy Day of the great new universal religion – shopping.