Carnival of crassness

Wednesday, 12th December 2007

Stephen Bayley on why he despises December’s tawdry and sentimental retail landscape

First celebrated in Britain in the year 512 on a day hitherto reserved for the worship of Satan, Christmas has become a source of torment for the earth-bound fastidious aesthete. Whichever way you look at it, Christmas is a calamity. The mood of paranoid desperation created during the season of goodwill was wonderfully caught by the American humorist Sylvia Wright in the title of her 1957 collection Get away from me with those Christmas Gifts! Three years earlier, in an article in Harpers’ Magazine, Wright had introduced the world to the ‘mondegreen’, the comic result of mishearing a lyric.

As a child, Wright’s mother had read to her from Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetrie and she, while listening to some dire Scottish ballad, had misheard ‘laid him on the green’ as ‘Lady Mondegreen’, hence the happy coinage. Soon, Christmas mondegreens started to be noticed. ‘Get dressed ye merry gentlemen’ is one example. ‘Barney’s the King of Israel’ is another.

This is the best literary salvage you can expect at this time of year. Alas, no one reads Percy’s Reliques any more. Sadly, very few will even be bothered with mondegreens. Nice ambiguity is too much like hard work. Instead, current bestsellers on Shakespeare’s isle include Do Ants Have Arseholes? and a memoir by Richard Hammond, best known for sustaining mild tabloid brain damage while clowning in a pseudo dragster on telly.

Ernest Jones, the jewellers, is predicting that bestselling gifts during the next few weeks will be a DKNY black strap wristwatch (£115) and a multicoloured trinket keyring. Truly, Christmas proves, if proof were needed, that no one ever went bust underestimating the public’s taste. In this area of sensitivity, Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’ is an instructive case study. He wrote, ‘There’s never been such a day in Beverly Hills, LA/ But it’s December twenty-fourth/ And I’m longing to be up north’. Los Angeles expects 74 per cent sunshine in December with an average daily maximum of 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet Berlin’s wince-inducing rhyme is revealing of a psychological state beyond redemption by sunshine. What strange yearnings for a chilly and distant north did Berlin betray? The Englishman, as D.H. Lawrence once observed, is only happy travelling south, but Berlin wanted to go the other way. To a mysterious, unknown place.

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Laurie Macdonell-Sanchez

December 27th, 2007 10:01pm Report this comment

Stephen Bayley's crucified Santa in Tokyo brought to mind the cultural inconsistencies and anachronisms in the Japanese kiddy cartoons my daughters used to watch some years ago on TV stations in Latin America. Most were forgivable, once I had explained the inaccuracies to my little girls. NOT so was the inclusion in children's fare of such western cultural taboos as blatant bloodiness, snot bubbles and flatulence emanating from the human heroes, heroines and even the animal sidekicks. As a result, afternoon TV was off-limits & we stocked up on the pirated videocassettes of the Disney classics so readily available on the local markets.

TRH

January 8th, 2008 9:21pm Report this comment

Your terminology is confusing. Most of your complaints are about Advent which the retail industry has renamed 'Christmas'. There's no reason for us to follow suit. Stores throw out their Christmas trees on Boxing Day but that's when true Christmas begins. Advent is about drunken young men staggering about the streets wearing Santa hats and singing Jingle Bells out of tune. Christmas is about time off work and spent with the family - walks, football matches etc.

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