Goodbye to all tat
ARTS
ROY STRONG
Has it occurred to you that Christmas is a leaden weight dragging you slowly down- wards into an abyss of mythological pap as the years go by? We are slowly being men- tally asphyxiated by the ghastly cards we would gladly abandon sending, by the cotton-wool snowman one feebly buys at vast cost, later found to be filled with a load of plastic junk which. the children obliterate in three minutes fiat. If you feel lashed to your spangled fairy- topped tree by your own gaudy paperchains, or that you would like to shoot that nauseating plaster robin nodding on the top of that in- edible chocolate log, read on. This is a message to all ,those who need the strength to free themselves from the triumph of tastelessness, vulgarity and cheap sentiment that epitomises the British Christmas of the mid-twentieth century.
Take Christmas decorations, for instance, and in the case of those in Regent Street the farther they are taken the better. With an iconography that sticks relentlessly in the never-never-land of Christmas mythology we have come through snowflakes and enceinte angels to fairy castles sitting on bubble cloud;. Near by even gay Carnaby Street has failed to rise out of the mire, and Oxford Street mercifully has abandoned lights this year. Apart from the traffic chaos caused by those who actually want to see these lights, I can hardly think of a worse advertisement for British design. And, one may add, some may end up, having travelled via Christmas 1968 in Doncaster or Scunthorpe, adorning a street in Bangkok.
Why, when Britain is supposed to be lead- ing the world in the arts of design, when con- tinentals and Americans alike are falling over themselves to buy our clothes and other dotty goodies, do we persist in this apotheosis of plaster gnomeland suspended over some of London's main thoroughfares? Why can't we commission each year one of our leading artists, a. Bridget Riley or a Peter Blake, to design super Christmas decorations? The great artists of the past, Leonardo and Rubens, for example, all designed for public spectacles and would be appalled by our insatiable indulgence in aesthetic dross.
And then there are Christmas cards. Nancy Mitford could have a field day on the U and non-U of cards, for few things provide such a devastating index to the English class sys- tem. From the photograph of the backwoods county family at the meet to the working-class vision of crinoline ladies staggering through ten-foot -drifts to distant churches, from the greeting in every language from Swahili to Serbo-Croat of your international do-gooders to your printed addressed jobs with logs blazing away in a rookery-nookery fireplace of. stolid stockbroker belt, they epitomise a number of separate class dreamworlds. Cul- ture-mongers, of course, crash across the class barriers by tearing off to our major museums for their cards. There is nothing like a Gentile Bellini Madonna and Child for associating yourself with high good taste, and, if you really want to keep them guessing, pop a leaf of British Museum Additional MS 50,000 (the Oscott Psalter to you) in the post. Besides the dislocation of the postal services, to which I strongly object, the Christmas card etiquette is slowly moving towards the complexities of card-leaving at the close of the last century.
What started as a pleasantry has become a tangled nightmare, a drudge that extends back- wards in time if you have friends in Australia. Even the idea of charity cards has palled since a load of their tinsel trumpery was shot through my letter-box unasked for some time in November.
First prize in my Christmas card contest this year goes to the one with two laughing [sic] bears whizzing across the snow with the message. 'Hello, Husband! Merry Christmas! I sure was using my little old Noggin/The day I got you on my Toboggan.' Second prize: a pair of paper legs extending from an ermine- edged red mini-skirt (Mother Christmas?): 'Santa likes stockings that don't run or tear/ So I told him you had—a smashin' pair.' The competition for the best Christmas card verse had to be abandoned, but I hope that our bud- ding Thomas Churchyards and John Taylors will not waste away in the intervening twelve months.
Christmas is also a good time to shift any form of religious tat. Luminous crib figures are churned out and one cannot go wrong with a Madonna and Child in.a transparent plastic dome which, when shaken, produces a snow- storm. Advent calendars take some beating, with little doors opening one by one telling a very odd biblical story which seems to lead via holly, a jack-in-the-box, a lantern and a Christmas pudding to the Nativity. This touches the crux of the matter, since what one loathes about Christmas is the accretion of mytho- logical garbage and instant emotional slush around an event which has significance alone for believers.
The simple figures of the Virgin and Child, St Joseph, the kings and shepherds have become the nodal point of a Christmas iconography which would have made Prince Albert and Dickens think twice before popularising the Christmas tree and writing A Christmas Carol. Somehow the average mind can now effortlessly move.on through bells, birds (robins in particu- lar), lights (all sizes, colours, and including lan- terns), candles (both altar and table), reindeer, snow, sleighs, Toad of Toad Hall, coaches and fours, Scrooge, stockings, snowmen, frost and ice, crinoline ladies, blazing fires, logs, mistle- toe, holly, turkey, iced cake, Christmas pud- ding (almost any pile-up of food), singers (carol or choirboy), angels, fairies, panto- mimes and the whole olde worlde apparatus. Let us hope that this ghastly load of tatty trash will sink into social desuetude during the coming century.
And, talking of things falling into disuse, I end with an old custom and a merry from that salacious gossip, John Aubrey. Apparently in olden time in Oxfordshire if a maid asked a man for ivy, and he refused her, she and her girl friends ganged up, stole his breeches and nailed them up. Interesting to speculate what a modern Frazer would make of our present Christmas mythology.
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