An occasional frosty-looking Santa Claus poked his incongruous head out of Buenos Aires' busy shopping centres this week and red stockings were hammered onto apartment doors.
But the real Christmas action was in the city's pawn shops and public squares, where hundreds of thousands of people defied poverty to keep up the ancient tradition.
Argentinians are fond of an expression which says "misery there may be, but don't let it show", so it's OK to blow next year's budget on this week's celebrations.
They cannot be parted form their precious slabs of meat, but lamb is favoured over turkey on the big day, while nuts and dried fruit are a reminder that the whole affair is imported from Europe. But so is much of Argentina, where people of Italian and Spanish roots abound, and entire villages still identify themselves as Irish.
"It will be strictly turkey and ham out here," said Fr Joe Campion, a Pallotine priest based in San Antonio de Areco, a rural Irish enclave south of Buenos Aires.
As if on cue, the smell of pork and beef roasting slowly on an open grill marked the beginning of summer in the neighbourhood yesterday, as parents shifted dinner tables, children and radios out of their homes and onto the streets.
The meal lasted most of the day, the volume of chatter rising implacably as wine bottles piled up on the pavement and fizzy cola bottles quenched children in danger of meltdown.
The smell from the street is overpowering, but closing the windows is out of the question, as the thermometer rests lazily at 40 C and the smell of one's own burning flesh is even less inviting than that of a dead animal.
The city mayor, Mr Fernando de la Rua, anxious to dispel the general bad humour which has enveloped the city, stuck up large posters ordering city districts to distribute pan dulce (sweet bread, not sweetbreads) in public squares to the growing army of unemployed, who have a habit of turning surly at the year's end, weary perhaps at the prospect of the same economic abyss in the coming year.
In the glorious post-war days, President Juan Peron and his glamorous wife Evita personally turned up to give away sweet bread and sidra, a mild beer which is intoxicating in the blistering sun.
"Christmas is celebrated in the streets," affirmed Ms Veronica Diz, a legal secretary in a busy city office, preparing to shut down for the month of January.
The temptation to roam the streets at all hours is heightened by a superb public transport system, as 289 buses (I counted them) criss-cross the city both day and night, costing a flat fee of 50 p per person. It is a remarkable sensation to board a full bus at 3 a.m., as if the city's offices had just closed for the day. Pizza parlours and ice-cream shops buzz with life, cafes and clubs are open all night, even on Christmas Day.
The inevitable office parties spilled onto the streets in recent days but there were few signs of Christmas cheer, beyond relief at the prospect of a holiday. "The whole thing went rotten 10 years ago," Walter, the local newspaper seller, told me yesterday, "the country is sick".
Much of Argentina's indigenous population, living in isolated regions of the country, preserves the carol-singing and Bible-reading habits imposed at swordpoint when the Spanish arrived, centuries ago. The Catholic Church still dominates the nation's consciousness, with President Carlos Menem, the son of immigrant grocers from Damascus, obliged to become a Catholic as a precondition to becoming President in 1989, a ruling since changed in the revised 1994 constitution.
For most people, however, Christmas is a family time, Christmas Eve in particular, when an evening meal is celebrated and presents shared out on the stroke of midnight. At that point families pile into cars and tour the city, stopping off at the homes of relatives. Others fulfil a religious promesa, by touring up to a dozen churches, in recognition of a blessing received or desired.
Still more people get into their cars, with several bottles of wine consumed and drive like lunatics, that is, like Argentinian drivers. Death on the road is the leading cause of death among people aged two to 35, according to Argentina's Society of Traffic Engineering. The first speed limits in the country were introduced just three years ago.
Meanwhile, the skies over Buenos Aires begin to look like Baghdad, as elaborate home-made explosives send tracer arcs over the horizon. That may sound like an unforgiveably frivolous comparison, but while the victims of Operation Desert Fox are still to be counted, the victims of faulty fireworks and road deaths in Argentina will run into hundreds over the holiday period.
Once Christmas is over, the evacuation of Buenos Aires, or "furnace city" will begin, as offices close for the month of January and anyone with sufficient means and a brain in their head travel directly to the nearest beach. I will be staying put, hoarding my ration of sweet bread and see-through beer.