Carnival of crassness
Stephen Bayley on why he despises December’s tawdry and sentimental retail landscape
Whether the distance is psychological or real, it’s all a matter of displacement. Sad that we so urgently want to forget the everyday ourselves, but it is curious to note how very little of the Traditional English Christmas is attributable to a native source. Tinsel was a byproduct of silversmithing, commercialised into decoration in Germany in the early 17th century. The fir tree was venerated by insanitary pagan German tribes (the ones who used to groom their hair with rancid butter, much to the disgust of Roman chroniclers) before George III’s Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz introduced its de-luxe successor, the Christmas tree, to the royal family. The next century, Victoria’s German cousin-husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, popularised it. An 1848 picture in the Illustrated London News showing Victoria and Albert around a tree at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight travelled around the world and established the need, witnessed this week up and down the country, for melancholy people to manhandle non-drop spruce into Sharans and Previas.
It was Albert’s overactive lieutenant, the arts administrator Henry Cole, creator of the V&A, who introduced the Christmas card to the public in 1843. It carried the ineffable copyline: ‘A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year’. The Times’s 1882 obituary of Cole said, ‘Wherever the influence of South Kensington has penetrated...has brought the attractions and influence of art to bear on the life and industry of the country.’ Well, not exactly. Earlier, Cole had introduced Rowland Hill’s penny-post to a grateful nation. Brought together with the Christmas card, the post introduced the mass consumption of bogus sentiment. Here was the origin of junk mail, another Christmas gift.
Junk art is Christmas’s own. It was late December 1822 when the New Yorker Clement Clarke Moore, the author of a Hebrew dictionary, wrote what has become perhaps the most famous bit of doggerel in the language. Recording the precise place and circumstances, his poem begins: ‘’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house/ Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.’ Ever since, the offer of junk art has been impossible to modify or deter.
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Laurie Macdonell-Sanchez
December 27th, 2007 10:01pmStephen 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 9:21pmYour 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.