The Decorative Arts?

An earlier version of this story appeared in Voice of the Hill, November 2004

You know … when it comes to Holiday décor, lots and lots of people simply lose control and give in to their basest impulses. We’re talking people who usually have impeccable taste, beautifully appointed homes, manicured lawns, and colour coordinated flower beds, who will after Thanksgiving chuck all of their fine living decorum for a chance to have the biggest honkin’ festival of lights in all of Christendom right in their own front yard. Why? I haven’t the faintest idea but I will tell you that neither money, social position, nor proximity to power guarantees good taste at the Holidays. No matter what area you cruise through, whether it is majestic East Capitol, quaint Park Street, or funky H Street, you will see what I mean.

Like many Hill dwellers, I am not a native Washingtonian or even a Southerner so I don’t always “get” the local cultural folkways. I grew up in Saskatoon, a small mid-western city in the middle of nowhere, north of the 49th parallel, where 40 below zero on Christmas Day is not unknown and people buck up with the fact that “at least it is a dry cold.” (Second favourite local tag line: “at least the sun is shining.” Yeah, well it is so cold that your car battery is completely dead, the dog refuses to go outside, and everyone – male & female – looks like the Michelin man when they do go out, but at least the sun is shining…) When people decorated their houses for Christmas, it was pretty subdued. (And let’s be honest here, in my neighbourhood there were no menorahs and Kwanza was unheard of.) We thought it rather fancy when our parents put coloured lights along the roof line of our houses. Occasionally in a neighbour’s front yard you would see a plywood Santa that Dad made and the kids painted. You could only see this objet d’art in daylight or when the outside light at the front door was on. Some blocks were slightly more dramatic putting on a thematic display – Candy Cane Lane, Bell Crescent – but again these were uniform home-made cutouts, a little cheesy but definitely cute. Granted this was in the Stone Age but I’m willing to bet that many of you would agree that the ghosts of Christmas past were a lot less fussy than they are today.

Now, right after Halloween the stores start rolling out as much holiday kitsch as they have space for. Sure we complain to one another that it is way too early to be thinking about Christmas but then fall all over ourselves at the big box retailers to get the best “stuff” before anyone else can get it. Rational, sensible, conservative professionals we Washingtonians are, but when it comes to our Christmas décor rituals, it’s a slam dunk that good taste loses out to raw emotional sentiment every time.

Check this: $149 will get you a “4-pc. grapevine-style sleigh-set with motion” that is covered in little lights. You won’t want to forget the accompanying “grapevine-style buck and doe with motion” that has even more teeny lights for an additional $49. Throw in the “4-pc holographic indoor/outdoor train set with chasing lights” for a mere $29 and you are well on your way to having your own personal winter wonderland. But wait! You still need Old St. Nick or at least a snowman to complete your diorama. For a measly $49 you can have a “42-inch twinkling snowman” with a red bow, top hat, and scraggly arms that if you squint might look like real sticks that fell from your “6-foot downswept twig tree” (with more lights, of course), that too was just $49. Now you are all set having enough wattage in front of your house to light the entire Capitol dome, to say nothing of the dizzying array of perpetual motion animals that could, if harnessed, run an artificial snow machine if you could just get your hands on one!

I’m just asking, but what is the deal with Santa these days? I mean when I was little, Santa rocked; I loved going to the Bay with my Mum (that’s the Hudson’s Bay Co. for those of you not from God’s country), dressed up in a red velvet dress with lace around the collar to get my picture taken with the Big Guy. The Bay was the best place to visit Santa because you also got a little white ceramic bell to tie onto the zipper of your jacket that made little tinkling sounds when you moved just so. Now that I am a teeny bit older & hopefully wiser (although there are those who may dispute that) I think Santa is a very existential dude. However, I really could live without seeing him in every retail outlet from Baby Gap to Midas Muffler, and certainly I would die happy if I never again saw him bobbing up and down in all of his 25 foot tall glory in the parking lot of just about any mall, grocery store, or car dealership you can name.

Not to be overly critical of the sacred, but I need to know: what’s with the over-the-top Vegas inspired manger scenes you see in front yards and some churches? Is it necessary to have quite so many multi-coloured spotlights poised on the crèche? Did the angels really wear tinsel on their heads? I know there were animals in the stable, but reindeer? In Bethlehem? And honestly! Do you really think it is appropriate for Bing Crosby to be crooning White Christmas to the Baby Jesus? I’m just sayin’ …

In all seriousness though, no one loves the holiday season and a festive décor more than I do. I adore sparkly twinkle lights on a real fir tree placed strategically in the front window so passers-by can admire it from the street (giving you an indoor-outdoor decorative action -- a nice two-fer as it were); underneath should be beautifully wrapped parcels (done by the nice church ladies at the mall) evoking memories of the 15 different unsolicited Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma catalogues received since Halloween; hand stitched, monogrammed stockings (at only $50 each) hanging from the fireplace mantle; and best of all, billions of cookies and gooey squares you couldn’t possibly eat but spent the last 4 weeks baking.

Any of this sounding familiar? I knew it! Santa told me you would understand. I saw him picking up a few things at Frager’s last week …