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.