(FORTUNE Magazine) – A witch flies on a broomstick to drop Christmas gifts down Italian chimneys; in southern Syria a camel does the hauling; the honorable porter's name in Japan is Santa-san. Deliverers may differ across borders, but shoppers are the ones who fill the sacks. On the next several pages acquisitive crowds around the world make ready for the holiday. These luxurious images, recorded last year, will surely repeat themselves this year and next: the shoppers pressing along the avenues, swarming in and out of stores to the sound of bells and the smell of chestnuts, pausing to ooh and aah at enchanting window displays and shimmering fir trees. Christmas, wrote Dickens, is ''the only time I know of, in the long calendar year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely.'' They fling open their pocketbooks as well. Americans, for example, spend an extra $50 billion between October and New Year's, the official Christmas shopping season. If this year is anywhere near normal, U.S. department stores will log one-third of their annual sales during the period; Japanese stores, about 15% in December alone. Toy vendors, like the world's largest, Hamleys, located on Oxford Street in London, or the fabled F.A.O. Schwarz on Fifth Avenue in New York City, will probably do a merry 50% or more of their business at Christmas. Credit cards and lengthy lists in hand, consumers will buy gifts ranging from the sublime to the sensible. Dinosaurs are dead, toy watchers report, but teddy bears still delight the world over. Adults exchange just about everything but ten lords a-leaping and eight maids a-milking. Hermes, the % elegant Parisian shop, will gift-wrap one of its coveted silk scarves every 20 seconds on Christmas Eve. Few holidays capture the imagination of so many. Even in Japan, where less than 1% of the population is Christian, Yuletide is widely celebrated with artfully packaged gifts and wee-hour reveling. The ubiquitous Christmas tree crowns plazas around the globe and dazzles no fewer than 75% of U.S. households -- though half the evergreens Americans trim are plastic rather than Scotch pine or Douglas fir. In the Tannenbaum capital of the world, indoor shopping arcades draw spirited throngs, but nothing matches the liveliness of Germany's outdoor Christmas markets, which sell sausages, sweets, and holiday gifts. Rome's Piazza Navona is another alfresco wonderland. Each December evening the oval- shaped plaza is bathed in light cast by dozens of stalls. Browsers thread their way through stacks of books, toys, records, nougat candy, and videogames, ever alert for professional pickpockets -- Christmas fixtures as universal as miniature lights. Christmas glows from Scandinavian windowsills, where candles pierce the dusk that arrives soon after lunch. In Eastern Europe, where winter is dark because of energy shortages and sparsely stocked stores, the good cheer of the season cannot be extinguished. Every December in Warsaw, Bratislava, and Budapest, families surrender their bathtubs for about a week so that schools of freshwater carp, a holiday delicacy, will have a place to swim. Neither firs nor frosty climes are prerequisites for Christmas cheer. South of the equator the holiday falls in the dead of summer, and perspiring shoppers in Australia are just as game as those who bundle up for the expedition. The difference: Australians head for the beach, not the hearth, to escape the elements. This year the joke in Rio, where ice cream makers are popular gifts, is that Christmas will be white after all. Saddled with an enormous foreign debt and brutal inflation, Brazilians are referring to the white linings of their empty pockets.