New York — Holidays should be a festive time, but only at rare moments do I share either the commercially produced cheer or the authentic good spirits of the period. My reasons are usually personal ones, but the almost daily massacres from Colorado to San Bernardino have affected and darkened my responses.
The abattoir much of the world has turned into repels and frightens me. I feel that we are in limbo — and the only solutions offered to the daily violence we live with are campaign rhetoric and militant sound bites. The future seems bleak, and we are beset with terrorist forces that defy normal logic and political strategies and alliances.
These are forces that can be undermined but not defeated by the bombing, since they are not bound to a specific geographical territory — though I understand the political and emotional need (retribution) to bomb them.
There are times, and I don’t want to seem hyperbolic, that I feel we are all trapped in a world where barbarism has become the norm. And I’m heartsick that too large a portion of the American public embraces the aggressive barroom talk and entertaining demagoguery of Trump for solace. They are comforted by his arrogantly simplistic and crude sentiments that make the ominous complexity of the world we face seem manageable for them. He is a candidate who offers no political policy, merely faith in the power of his blind bravado.
Still, at moments I take some pleasure in the way the city celebrates the season. Walking along Midtown I see tourists crowded around the windows of various department stores, beguiled by their ornate Christmas displays — Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale’s, Bergdorf Goodman, and Barney’s New York all indulge in these big-budget spectacles. Given that close to five million visitors come to the city between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve alone, this is the time of year the stores reap their greatest profits. It follows that Saks Fifth Avenue has gone all out on its six street-level windows, depicting six icy wonders of the world (a frozen Taj Mahal, a cold Coliseum). And higher up on the store’s entire huge Fifth Avenue façade, an enormous Winter Palace comes and goes made of dancing lights, with Christmas songs sounding like grand opera filling the street and completing the grandiose effect. Saks expects to convert many of those who stop and look at the windows into customers.
None of these over-the-top displays and Fifth Avenue’s Christmas lighting aim at subtlety but their spectacle attempts to envelop us all in holiday good feelings, and it succeeds with many. I much prefer the young bearded men (from Vermont?) simply selling fragrant Christmas trees leaning on one another on street corners, or the quieter more tasteful window displays in small shops along Madison Avenue, to provide me with a touch of genuine holiday sentiment.
Of course, the Christmas window displays, variety shows, and dioramas are not aimed at a jaundiced observer like myself. But I’m not that dour that I don’t respond with pleasure to crowds lining up to take a look at Rockefeller Center’s 80-foot-tall-Christmas tree, adorned with 45,000 multi-colored LED lights, or to shoppers purposively bustling about department stores while Bing Crosby sings “White Christmas.” It’s what people come to New York to embrace — a collective holiday experience that makes us feel that all is right with the world.
