It was one of the more unusual holidays for everyone in Afghanistan, from the journalists to the foreign diplomats, to the British and US soldiers who are now calling this place home.
It was also a strange day for the Muslim citizens of Afghanistan, isolated for more than five years from the outside world, and now host to the odd traditions of these peculiar Westerners.
Skinny cedar and pine trees did their best to become Christmas trees on bustling Chicken Street. Bakeries sold kilos of decorated cookies and made elaborate cakes with improvised and mostly near- phonetic English inscriptions such as "Hari Christmas".
"Congratulations Christmas" said the waiter in the dining room of the shabby Intercontinental Hotel. Fox News, an American television network, strung lights along the fourth floor corridor. At the Mustafa Hotel, the owner cooked a complimentary Christmas dinner for the journalists staying there.
The locals knew this was a celebration for the Westerners and they put their hearts into it.
One man is known for doing festive feather and ribbon decorations on Eid, the end of Ramadan that is one of Islam's biggest holidays.
He arrived at a house rented by some American journalists and turned the walls into red-feathered dioramas, along with a sparkling centrepiece dangling from the chandelier.
Many journalists have rented houses here, so Christmas Eve and Christmas Day parties were in order, with almost too many to attend. Newsweek threw a bash that featured a number of US marines arriving with German beer that had been sitting in the abandoned US embassy since 1989, along with a few bottles of Beaujolais that sadly were undrinkable even to the most desperate of palates in this officially dry country.
USA Today also threw a party with some of the best cooking, featuring turkey and pumpkin.
The US embassy staff decided to get into the spirit and invited all US citizens here to attend a lawn party.
Fortunately the unseasonably warm weather held up, as the party was held on the embassy lawn because no large enough room inside was yet habitable. The skeleton embassy staff is currently living in an underground bunker on the grounds while electricians and plumbers attempt to bring the building back from ruins.
Generosity prevailed; when some Americans brought British friends along to the party, the US passports-only rule was relaxed with a single security/sport question: "Who is the manager of the New York Yankees?"
The embassy, which was reopened only a week ago, is being staffed by a temporary charge d'affaires from Nairobi, a political officer from Hawaii who is originally from Arkansas, a security man from Washington DC, and a collection of soldiers with accents from the US deep south.
The new government's ministers, however, did not take the day off. Several continued to look for office space amidst the destroyed buildings.
"This is one of the biggest jobs of this new government. The scale of the job is frightening," the Education Minister, Mr Rasul Amin, said while visiting his dilapidated ministry.
"We are beginning from nothing, from less than nothing."
Dr Sima Samar, first deputy minister for women's affairs, considered a building that has been used by the Taliban and was covered with yellowed fundamentalist Koranic literature.
"It will take six months to get the smell of the Taliban out of this office," she said.
US armed forces marked Christmas as a working holiday, bringing American-style celebrations to their Afghan outposts from serenading villagers with carols to challenging locals in touch football.
"We brought the spirit of Christmas into the camp," Air Force Tech Sgt Junius Harvey of Pittsburgh said at Bagram air base, north of the capital, Kabul.
In a chilly hangar, US and British forces fashioned a Christmas tree from cardboard and camouflage netting, trimming it with flares and empty containers from military rations.
They got a break from their military meals with a turkey-and-mashed-potato dinner that also featured pumpkin and pecan pie.
Afghanistan's interim administration, meanwhile, held a Cabinet meeting yesterday, the second since Saturday's inauguration.
The defence and interior ministers and the security chief were preparing reports on the security situation in the capital and elsewhere.