In the worst possible taste

What are the rules of taste at Christmas? How might the fastidious chart a neat path through this garish and cluttered carnival of unreflective consumption? How might dignity be maintained in this tinselled and glitter-balled waste of space?

Actually, how might we design it better? Nicky Haslam once and quite correctly, without a flicker of irony, advised me that ‘coloured lights are common’. There is value in such advice and we will return to this refreshing idea a little further down the page.

Germans and Americans have a peculiar historic hold over our imaginations at this time of year. It was Victoria’s earnest German Prince, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who first imported the hitherto pagan Christmas tree. And it was Albert’s over-busy man-of-business Henry Cole who introduced the mass-produced Christmas card, unwelcome prototype of junk mail.

In the wince-making doggerel of ‘’Twas the night before Christmas’, Clement Clarke Moore, a New York writer and translator (although some say it was Henry Livingston), established the idea that Santa Claus’s preferred transport option was a reindeer-powered sledge. Dear me. That archly antique motif of ‘’twas’ is a reliable clue to rubbish literary content. Glitter has a similar warning role in the matter of decoration.

The evolution from Saint Nicholas, sourced in the 4th-century Christian Greek Bishop of Myra, patron saint of children, to the secular, rubicund, guffawing, unwholesome, gift-distributing, grotto-dwelling Santa was fixed in the popular imagination with advertisment artwork for the Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta by a depressive Swedish painter called Haddan Sundblom. Santa belongs not to the ages, but to a US beverage corporation.

Meanwhile, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer appeared first, not in Norse mythology nor the teachings of the Church Fathers, but in 1939 as a display for the Montgomery Ward department stores.