I have just embarked on a worldwide tour in search of that increasingly elusive season called Christmas, and I can report that it’s not going so well.
I decided it was necessary to mount this expedition last Saturday after a tour around London’s West End revealed precious few signs that Christmas might be just around the corner. Yes, there were some obvious signals of a shift in the season but nothing really to say what type of holiday might be approaching. The display in Regent Street (a bit of netting strung across the road with lights attached) suggested that we might be celebrating a deep-sea fishing festival in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, shop windows with bits of cotton wool strewn around the mannequins’ feet made me think not of a dazzling snowfall but rather that we were in for another round of having the stuffing beaten out of us by the markets. And the adults walking around in furry antlers eating chips made me a little sad.
I have recently returned from New York, the city that I believe both invented and destroyed the commercial version of Christmas as we know it. I was hoping for a bit of good old-fashioned holiday cheer to keep spirits up in the face of cancelled “holiday” parties, slashed gift lists and “e-card”-only policies. But things felt so glum all over the city that I couldn’t wait to get on a flight back to Heathrow – and that’s saying something.
New York used to do a brilliant job at Christmas. Over the past two decades, however, corporate-fuelled political correctness has done a wonderfully efficient job of extinguishing one of the biggest holidays on western calendars. And so, paradoxically, in their drive to avoid offending some customers, they’ve managed to forget that many of the trappings that have been stripped from the retail experience have also left stores feeling rather dull and flat. What consumers have been left with is a sort of holiday mush that doesn’t mean much to anybody and results in a lot of very confused window-dressers and visual merchandisers.
December 2008 should be the time for Christmas to make its big, global comeback. Many world leaders are sitting around thinking about how to stimulate year-end spending and are failing to recognise that the solution is sitting on the calendar. Sadly, few possess the Christmas nuts to go down in the basement and pull out all the decorations and really go for it. Given the sad state of affairs in New York and the city’s knack for wallowing in a good drama, mayor Bloomberg might want to lead the charge by immediately employing a crack team of staff from Ralph Lauren to dress up in plaid outfits, pile into a convoy of pick-up trucks and head upstate to bring back as many pine boughs as they can carry.
This same team would be in charge of decorating all shops, corporate offices and government buildings across Manhattan, while special emergency broadcasting measures would turn all TV channels over to Martha Stewart for a full three weeks to get not only New Yorkers but the entire nation baking, stuffing, knitting, chopping, sewing and kneading. These two measures alone would do more to kick-start spending than anything that’s currently being cooked up in Washington, London or other droopy capitals around Europe.
On the other side of the Atlantic, London could also do with putting a few more Santas in department stores, cranking up the Christmas music, lighting candles everywhere and generally making the capital feel a bit more quaint and cosy. It all might sound terribly simple – indeed it is – but surround shoppers with a warm glow, pleasant scents and flattering lighting and they’ll find themselves in a mood to spend.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way an unenlightened executive or underling confused the religious version of Christmas with the commercial one and eradicated all the fun. Somehow Father Christmas came to be seen as Jesus in Nordic drag, gingerbread angels as tempting evangelists and reindeer as snorting threats to other global religions. The result is a mess of a season in most Anglo-Saxon countries, and it’s increasingly under threat in those corners of the world that still gently manage to merge ancient tradition with modern commerce – that is, Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
By the time you’ve read this my Christmas expedition will have taken me to Toronto and Los Angeles (both destinations where I know I’ll have trouble finding the Christmas I once knew so well) and I’ll be preparing to cross the Pacific to visit the land that has both perverted and preserved the commercial version of Christmas better than any other – Japan. If you want flight attendants wearing Merry Christmas pins complete with sprigs of holly, carols piping from every Sharp speaker, cappuccinos with cinnamon sprinkled in the shape of Santa, Jesus references merged with Rudolph and red, white and green gift wrapping everywhere – then Tokyo’s retail wonderland is your place. Is it all a bit commercial, a little silly, over-scented and over-the-top? Perhaps. But then that’s just what Christmas used to be before it became the uninspired-sounding “holidays”.
Tyler Brûlé is editor-in-chief of Monocle magazine.
tyler.brule@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/brule
