Stephen Bayley on why he despises December’s tawdry and sentimental retail landscape
Christmas balls. This is a season to be forced into jollity. And one of mixed messages, dark ambiguities. Ghosts of Christmas past make me shudder. There is an old story about a Tokyo department store which, anxious to demonstrate its easy familiarity with sophisticated Western tastes, arranged for a vitrine to have an illuminated tableau of Santa Claus busy being crucified.

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