Merry Christmas, Vietnam!

Vietnam's Highway One is still the country's main north-south road. Twenty years ago, when my wife and I rode a decrepit Soviet-made bus along Highway One from Hue, just south of the DMZ, all the way to Ho Chi Minh City (nee Saigon) in the south, the road was so sleepy that for miles on end it was covered with rice kernels, which farmers had placed on the asphalt to dry.

Now the highway is bustling -- at least the stretch reaching five hours northward from Saigon, which my family recently rode, and at least with motorscooters, or "motos," today's universal transport vehicle of Vietnam. (Question for later consideration, and worry: the roads are already full of scooters. What will happen when the scooters become cars?)

And in the vicinity of Saigon, Highway One is also loaded with churches, mainly Catholic. Many of the churches, in this Nativity season, had creches outside. But that's not the impressive point about the Christmas season in Vietnam and this region as a whole.

Despite its French-Catholic colonial heritage, Christians are a small minority in Vietnam. They are a much, much smaller minority in China -- and an almost undetectable presence (perhaps one percent) in Japan, despite missionary efforts through several centuries.

Yet in all of these countries and almost everywhere else in Asia, Christmas is a huge-deal public celebration. Buildings all over Hanoi, where I now am, have Merry Christmas banners across the front. Streetside vendors have as their featured items Santa hats. A Christmas tree stands in the lobby of my current hotel, in Hanoi. In Shanghai, Chinese friends (including several who made a point of saying that they were atheists) said they had been saving money, since "one always needs more at Christmas time."

Message from Asia: Americans could be a lot calmer about issuing "Merry Christmas" greetings, and not pussyfooting around with "Happy Holidays," if they accepted the rest of the world's understanding, that this is a mid-winter festive gathering for family -- and commerce. In my youth, Christian preachers used to scold that Americans were forgetting the "true meaning of Christmas." Their worries were well founded -- which is to say, entirely wrong. The "true meaning," embraced around the world, is fellow-feeling, a way to stave off dark days, and, yes, a spur to merchandising. As the sign I'm now watching in Hanoi says, "Merry Christmas Everyone!"