Carnival of crassness

Wednesday, 12th December 2007

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

It was Clement Clarke Moore who helped to develop Santa symbolism by adding to established Germanic myth the amusing idea that he was inclined to enter houses through chimneys and, between such insurgences, was drunkenly ferried from roof to roof by flying reindeer. It was another New Yorker, Thomas Nast, who put visual form on Moore’s Father Christmas in his cartoons. But it was only when the Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia, appropriated Father Christmas that we achieved the fully mature, white-bearded, red-frocked, puce-faced monster who frightens children in Harrods today. Santa was redesigned by Haddon Sundblom, a lugubrious Swedish–American painter who worked for Coke’s advertising people. Up to the ripe 1950s Sundblom’s hyper-realist advertising art of Santa gave Coke ownership of this aspect of Christmas. Santa remains essentially pagan, but his Godless milieu had shifted from a dark Teutonic forest glade to a brightly lit American dream kitchen.

Then there is the problem of Christmas decorations. In a bravura attack of elitism, the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm said there was a direct, possibly even causal, link between a taste for decoration and poor education. The sociologist Herbert Gans said, ‘Low Culture...considers ornateness attractive.’ So, too, do local councils. Normally oblivious to the demands of art, in December budgets are suddenly found for trite and depressing illuminations. Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, maintained ‘there is no dirt in Heaven’ when she found her heaven on earth in the United States. But nor would there, surely, be British Christmas in Heaven. Excess grot and mad waste have no part in Paradise.

How to get away? A friend habitually used to book a ticket to New York on Christmas Day, travelling Air India and ordering a kosher meal. He felt this was about as far away as you could get from traditional horrors. And me? While Berlin and others look north, I am looking east. At last, no tree! No turkey! No terrible crackers! Instead, an apartment in Venice near the fish market. No more gluttony: an excess of nectar soon turns into gall. No further need of Rabelais’s cure for the horrible indigestive after-effects of all-the-trimmings: ‘vinegar brought up the rear to waas the mouth, and for fear of the Squinsy: also toasts to scower the grinders’. Instead, perhaps the anguilla con piselli e pomodoro, recommended by Giorgio Locatelli. And heard in the distance, if all goes well, some airs from Corelli’s Concerto Grosso Op. 6, No. 8 (inscribed by its composer ‘fatto per la notte di Natale’).

Wherever you are, there’s no getting away from the essential truth that Christmas is a foreign affair.

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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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