Carnival of crassness

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. Perhaps some similar installations on high streets and malls would have an admonitory effect on the sewers of avarice, cupidity and unreflective sentimental tosh that comprise Britain’s retail landscape in December. Then again, maybe not. There is perhaps something in the British personality that finds itself inevitably drawn, as maggots with rotting cheese, to the carnival of crassness that is Christmas.

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.