Just Saying | Bah, humbug: What happened to Hong Kong’s Christmas spirit?

For the last few years, walking home late at night along the footbridge that connects the train station to my residential estate, I would almost always come across an elderly woman with a trolley rummaging through rubbish bins.

I don’t see her any more these days, but I remember her vividly because she was such a regular fixture, and a somewhat incongruous sight with a Santa hat on during Christmas time as she scavenged for discarded material to be sold as scrap for recycling.

Christmas is here again and I can’t help wondering what has happened to her, one of the countless senior citizens lost among the ranks of the more than 1.3 million Hongkongers mired in poverty – elderly residents who have paid their dues but are still forced to eke out a living when they should be enjoying their twilight years in retirement.

I wonder if she’s too ill to work any more, or even alive.

And I wonder what Christmas, Santa hat and all, meant to her in this city, where the wealth gap is so extreme – the top 1 per cent of earners own more than half of Hong Kong’s wealth – that people like her have to scrounge for scraps while others can afford to eat, drink and be merry. All I see around me is crass consumerism instead of the fabled Christmas spirit.