News | Yuletide

Christmas around the world

Our correspondents celebrate on four continents

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The Chilterns | Auckland | Beijing | Tokyo | Florida


The Chilterns

THE Metropolitan tube leaves Baker Street every quarter-hour for the Chilterns. Converted flats in old brick terraces lie mashed together along the track in Marylebone, a bit like the passengers inside who sit three to a bench. The track crosses the Grand Union Canal at Rickmansworth, then heads onward through rolling chalk hills and beech woodland. In this landscape sheep huddle together for warmth and red kites hover over fields, where cold mist rises from wheat stubble.

It is a quiet ride, except for the rumble of the tracks and the very faint hum of the M25, which passes through Chorleywood in its orbit of London. London commuters consider conversation with strangers to be symptomatic of mental instability. More to the point, passengers are too horrified by tales of bank failures and lay-offs in the free daily newspapers these days to speak to each other.

A green and pleasant land

The Metropolitan line ends at Amersham, 27 miles from the city. John Betjeman once lamented that the whole of this “Metroland” would be paved over, leaving no room for buttercups. The population has increased threefold since 1900, yet the Chilterns remain a world away from the crowded bustle of London, due in large part to years of tight planning restrictions and soaring house prices.

Amersham is old enough to appear in the Domesday Book. It has the crooked doorways and sagging beams (still sturdy if you don't duck) to prove it. A stone memorial sits mostly ignored (except by the rain) in a field above the huge new Tesco grocery store on the edge of town. According to the monument's inscription, six men and one woman were burned alive here for “principles of religious liberty”. This region is littered with bits of the old hovering just on the periphery of now.

It is easy to wonder what “now” will look like after Christmas. At my local nativity play, tea-towel-headed shepherds use their staffs as light-sabres. After the play a very patient Father Christmas asks the hundredth little child what she wants for Christmas. She blubbers on his knee and reaches for mum. There is hot chocolate for all, and well-meaning parents become speckled with glitter as they attempt to create ornaments with their squirmy toddlers.

What makes an English Christmas? In “Watching the English”, Kate Fox says that much of the holiday's religious significance is commonly ignored (with the exception of the nativity play), and the term “Christmas” refers to “the entire holiday period from the 23rd/24th December right through to New Year's Day”.

I'm a newcomer and no expert, but I suspect the following things go on the list: mulled wine and mince pies; Christmas crackers packed with cheap plastic toys and flimsy paper crowns; a loaded, lit Christmas tree; mistletoe; fidgety kids at the nativity play and tacky innuendo for the adults at the kids panto; the drunken office party where all bad behaviour is magically forgiven; a huge roast-fowl dinner with Brussels sprouts on the side (reviled, but compulsory); Christmas pudding with brandy sauce; drinks before dinner; drinks with dinner; drinks after dinner; the Queen's speech; carollers; midnight mass; leftovers and drinks on Boxing Day (traditionally the day the alms boxes were taken around), plus an optional country walk and/or family argument.

The point is “cosiness and silliness”, says James Willoughby, an historian at Oxford, plus “nostalgic whimsy” with an emphasis on one's childhood. Mr Willoughby tells me the author of the quintessential snowy English Christmas template, Charles Dickens, saw grey drab Christmases as an adult. But as a child, the Little Ice Age cast snow over the landscape and froze the Thames, making way for raucous frost fairs on the ice in central London.

This December birthday festivities are underway for John Milton, who was born 400 winters ago and fled the London plague for the quiet of Chalfont St Giles, where he finished “Paradise Lost”. Milton's “happy rural seat of various view” remains. A more recent addition, Milton's Indian restaurant, has moved in across the road. Edward Dawson, who curates Milton's cottage to “stay out of mischief in semi-retirement” looks after an impressive collection of first editions, as well as a hair from the great man's head, which sits on display next to Keats ode to it. Mr Dawson laments that Milton's works are no longer held in such high esteem. Though Milton supported the deposition of the monarchy, two trees planted by royal hands thrive in his garden today, just beyond a weathered old door leading to the “necessarium”.

The winter solstice on December 21st marks the end of darkening days, and an inevitable sense of hope returns with the light. After Christmas green will creep back into the fields. Several miles from Amersham, lazy cows will lounge on a lush hill that leads from the River Chess at Sarratt Bottom to a little 14th-century church at the top. Here an inscription urges: “Peace be to all who visit this ancient house...pause awhile and allow the past to speak words of comfort to your soul...before you go forth from the calm of Sarratt into the busy world again.” There is much comfort in old things.

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Auckland

DOWN Auckland's charmless, canyon-like main drag, a Christmas controversy rages. At 48 years old and 25 metres tall, the “Whitcoulls Santa” (pictured below) towers in fibreglass splendour over the bookshop on the corner of Queen and Victoria Streets. But the pages of the New Zealand Herald are fizzing, and a public vote has been launched. Santa, say grinches, should go: he looks tired and battered, and displays “seedy actions”.

“Why did nobody in the past think the Whitcoulls Santa looked creepy?” wails a local columnist. Actually, since my Auckland childhood, I've been of that mind; jolly red suit aside, Santa's sinister mechanical wink, tight mirthless mouth and beckoning come-hither finger (which has cracked, and bears a large bandage) make him look like an old man children should avoid. Years ago, as a callow teenager, I fled Whitcoulls to avoid a roving paedophile, taking refuge in a menswear shop. It's an association I find hard to ignore.

Bad Santa?

My view is rebuffed, and in the end Santa is reprieved, with votes more than two to one in his favour. The seedy actions, it seems, have achieved iconic status. I note thankfully that another tradition—the annual “Santarchy” riot, when a drunken mob of Santas would run riot downtown in pre-planned mayhem—is absent, so far.

Yuletide in New Zealand is a summer-solstice affair, but colonial British antecedents remain in wintry rituals, decorations and food: fake snow adorns frontages and heavy roasts are dished up while the mercury soars. Slowly, with migration from East Asia and elsewhere, this is changing; a beach picnic, with salad, fresh seafood and chilled Sauvignon Blanc (terroir de kiwi) wins favour with my family. Still, back for my first southern Christmas since 1992, the north doesn't seem so far away.

On the ridge east of Queen Street, I attend a hotel's Christmas soiree. Long-haul tourism may have slowed, but business is brisk. A “very special guest” is promised: as David Beckham, a past-it but still pretty British football star has just jetted in, rumours abound. But it's only the fat man in red—red-faced, either from the heat or the abundant free champagne. He perches his ample behind atop his throne, and his red trousers are rent asunder with a sharp rip. Santa spends the evening with his knees coyly together; no one perches on them.

But there is no avoiding the photocall, and I find himself on one flank of Mr Claus, with the Langham hotel's glamorous press chief on the other. We clink glasses for the camera, and Santa grips our hips (a lot further north on my side, I note with some relief).

On the west side of the canyon, the burghers of Ponsonby, a once-fearsome Victorian inner suburb now fearsomely gentrified, display finer tastes. Franklin Road, a long street running downhill to the harbour, has for a decade hosted the “Franklin Road lights”, the frontages along the kilometre-long street lit up like…well, like Christmas trees.

Aucklanders from all over this sprawling conurbation have come to gawp and promenade. Lights fall in curtains from the balconies of the dinky wooden villas, and music blares: “I wanna wish you a Maori Christmas”, from the late-lamented Billy T. James, a comedian. The iconography remains northern: reindeer, elves and Santa, of course. Mangers and Wise Men are absent. Most householders (and quite a few on side-streets) have participated: I wonder about the level of coercion, and the possible power bills.

On the beach north of Auckland, barbeques abound, with another seasonal tradition—mass stomach upsets.

And a blast from the north is blowing throughout the country: New Zealanders' exposure to the international recession is as severe as anywhere else, though their influence is far less. But worries are postponed, and along the cliffs, the Pohutukawa trees—the “New Zealand Christmas tree”, with flowers as red as Santa's suit—are in bloom. On the pages of the Herald, vote-for-Santa has been superseded by a “Best Pohutukawa photos” competition.

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Beijing

A SMALL bookshop west of Tiananmen Square offers a quiet refuge from the Christmasy glitz of nearby department stores. Escaping can be hard. In recent years Beijing has all but abandoned its ideological reservations about the holiday. Trees, fairy lights and Father Christmases abound. They are loved by a nascent middle class whose own heritage is similarly replete with iconography celebrating redness, corpulence and beardedness. The Sanwei Bookstore, in a cluster of old-style buildings that have remarkably eluded the bulldozer, harks back to a Beijing that had yet to discover Christmas.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, more than a hundred people packed into its upper floor tea-room. A veteran Chinese journalist, Yang Jisheng, was there to talk about the famine that ensued after Mao Zedong's catastrophic Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s. The mass starvations—Mr Yang estimates that 36m people died—remain a taboo topic for public discussion in China. Mr Yang's book on the subject, “Tombstone”, which was published in Chinese in Hong Kong earlier this year, is banned on the mainland. Sanwei Bookstore had no copies for sale.

China's middle class, it is often claimed, is more interested in making money (and spending it in shopping malls) than in politics. But the gloomy history of the darkest days of Chairman Mao's rule still exerts a fascination. The audience that afternoon was mostly too young to have any memory of that era, but listened appreciatively as Mr Yang laid bare its horrors. Some still wore their thick coats in the stuffy room lined with specimens of Chinese calligraphy, potted plants and traditional watercolour paintings. A man recorded the proceedings on his BlackBerry. Others took notes. One man took a couple of photographs with his mobile phone of a goldfish in a tank in front of him (he was one of the few whose attention appeared to wander).

Mr Yang told of the lavish plenty enjoyed by officials even as many ordinary citizens died of hunger, and of how they lied about the cause of the famine (the period is still officially known as the “three years of natural disasters”—as if Mao had nothing to do with it). But as it began to grow dark outside and Mr Yang wrapped up his speech, he became a little more cautious. China needed political reform, he said, but not too fast otherwise there might be anarchy. Someone asked Mr Yang (to claps of encouragement from the audience) to elaborate on his views on the need for political change. Mr Yang declined, saying he had not studied the topic and it would be inappropriate in this venue to discuss the matter further.

He had reason to be cautious. Earlier in the week the authorities had arrested one of the country's best known political activists, Liu Xiaobo, after he and some 300 other academics, lawyers, journalists and other intellectuals circulated a petition known as Charter 08 (echoing Charter 77, a document signed by dissidents in Czechoslovakia in 1977 calling for human rights protection).

The petition called for sweeping reform, including freedom of the press and the right to form opposition political parties. As the economy sputters, a pillar of the party's legitimacy (its ability to deliver growth) is beginning to wobble. Such demands are the last thing the party wants in these anxious times. Officials are desperate for the middle class to get out and shop in order to help take up the slack caused by plummeting demand for China's exports.

The audience at the Sanwei Bookstore was still doing its bit for the economy. As they filed out down the stairs, attendees handed over 20 yuan (about $3) each to one of the bookstore owners. Few would have paused to reflect as they headed out into the darkened and bitterly cold street that exactly 30 years ago, close to where the nearby department stores now stand, Beijing residents swarmed around what they called Democracy Wall. There, in 1978, handwritten posters called for political change and attacked Mao's rule as much if not more forthrightly than Mr Yang had that afternoon. Back then few in Beijing had any thoughts of Christmas.

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Tokyo

CHRISTMAS in Tokyo starts the day after Halloween, which itself is marketed from the beginning of September: on November 1st pumpkins and bats give way to piped carols in the department stores, with the prospect of being guided to your required floor even on a warm autumn day by a scrumptious Santette in red miniskirt, snow hat and thigh-boots. Yet even before Twelfth Night, all vestige of Christmas (and indeed New Year's Day too) will have been swept away in favour of the next commercial watershed, Valentine's Day.

More than 50 years ago, two chocolate companies began promoting the now obligatory custom for women to give chocolate to their bosses, lovers and husbands on February 14th; in 1980 a group of marshmallow makers and other white confectioners countered this rank chauvinism with the notion that men should return the favour exactly a month later on White Day. Kurisumasu, in other words, is just one pony on the retailers' annual carousel.

But what a pony. No big city takes its Christmas adornment more seriously than does Japan's capital. The streets of the Ginza and Marunouchi shopping districts are bedecked and illuminated on a scale that shames Regent Street's pedestrian efforts. The window displays of upscale department stores are extravagant and rococo fantasies.

Reuters

Merry kurisumasu

Nor is there any of the political correctness found in America, which invented commercial Christmas but where a raw-blooded celebration of the, shall we say, Christian aspects of the festival (and even of Santa himself) has over the years been toned down out of respect to non-Christians. In Tokyo, carols and crosses are central to the show, though the urban legend of a department store that once had as the crowning glory of its Christmas exhibit a large cross with a beaming Santa nailed to it remains regrettably hard to substantiate.

True or false, the legend points to the utter decontextualisation of Tokyo's Christmas. This is unsurprising. Though Saint Francis Xavier, a notable Spanish Jesuit, brought Christianity to Japan in the mid-16th century, the country's populace is about 1% Christian today (most are Buddhist—though notably, Taro Aso is the country's first Roman Catholic prime minister). The widespread celebration of Christmas is relatively modern, dating back to the post-war American occupation. Christmas plays to two Japanese traits: an ingrained culture of gift-giving, and an obsession with most things Western. The retailers have milked these to perfection.

Yet stripping Christmas to its essential, commercial form is not at all to be sniffed at. This correspondent is surely not the only Roman Catholic who is rendered annually despondent at midnight mass by the shortcomings of his faith and by the urging of the priest to love thy neighbour (surely there must be exceptions). Nor can he be the only one who is happy to love his family unquestioningly at every other time of the year except Christmas, when enforced proximity and overindulgence raise blood pressure to hazardous levels.

By contrast, Tokyo does it broadly right. As a rule, Japanese families do not spend Christmas Day together—it is, after all, not even a holiday. Rather, if Christmas is to be celebrated, it is done on Christmas Eve. And that occasion is more traditionally the preserve of lovers.

Think of it as a warm-up for Valentine's Day. Couples will usually order a leg of chicken each for dinner (yes, Kentucky Fried Chicken has successfully marketed itself as a Christmas essential, and the jovial Colonel Sanders dresses the part). They will then hasten to one of Tokyo's neon-lit love hotels. There they will be directed to a bedroom decorated extravagantly in the festive spirit and on the waterbed will either romp for three hours (the so-called “rest” option) or spend the night (the “stay” tariff). Many establishments offer the facility for you to film your fun and take away the video. By contrast, when do more orthodox celebrants ever dig out the old Christmas Day home movie for a bit of light entertainment?

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Florida

“THEM: Brrrr! Us: Ahhh”; Monday's headline in the Fort Lauderdale-based Sun Sentinel summarising the nation's weather says almost everything you need to know about why people flock here at this time of year. It's the heat, of course. The north and west of the United States are shivering through freezing temperatures and blizzards; South Florida will be sunning itself in the 70s all week. On Tuesday, with perhaps just a hint of relish, the paper warns South Floridians who may be heading north for the holidays to beware of “a conveyor belt of winter storms expected to hit the Northwest and New England”.

This makes people in South Florida feel good. On Sunday many felt particularly good when watching the Miami Dolphins play the Kansas City Chiefs—not only because Miami won, putting themselves one victory away from the play-offs and continuing one of the most remarkable one-year turnarounds in the history of the National Football League, but also because the game was played in Arctic conditions in Kansas City, Missouri. The players breathed steam and huddled in blankets on the sidelines. Here bronzed bodies took a break from their beach volleyball to watch the television screens at the outdoor bar. This is the winter wonderland of South Florida; there is nowhere else quite like it in the continental United States.

AFP

Dreaming of a green Christmas?

And yet there is a palpable chill in the air this year; for the economic cooling has been especially severe in South Florida. The property crash here has been spectacular, and the impact is spreading through the economy. Taxes from retail sales in Fort Lauderdale were down 8.6% in September over the same month last year, worse even than Florida's overall decline of 8.2%.

Oddly, for an escapist place, South Florida has somehow contrived to be close to the national action at crucial times, at least in recent years. It was the hanging chads of Broward and Palm Beach Counties in 2000 that helped to put George Bush in the White House. Terrorists prepared here for their attacks of September 11th 2001. In 2005 Hurricane Katrina swept in to the Atlantic coast near Fort Lauderdale, on its way to the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans. And now, like a sorry bookend to the Bush presidency, the area is at the heart of the credit crunch, and many country-club members just up the road from here were investors with Bernie Madoff.

At first glance things here seem much the same as ever this Christmas. But on closer inspection the signs of trouble are all around—literally, when it comes to housing distress. “We buy homes. Cash…Fast”, says one roadside sign. Another advertises a toll-free number to support families threatened with foreclosure.

Normally at this time of year there are queues for the popular restaurants and at the cinema. Not now. In the shops, the sales started early: 30% off here, 50% there—even 70% in places. Some shops have disappeared and not been replaced, leaving a few strip malls with a sad, semi-abandoned look. Here in Pompano Beach, the Korean nail salon is gone. So is the Polish deli. The local shopping mall was refurbished in the hope of attracting big brand names such as Coach and Victoria's Secret; now it boasts a dollar store and the empty shelves of an out-of-business Linens 'n Things.

The boom, such as it was, came late to Pompano Beach, a perennially unfashionable (and therefore to some tastes rather charming) place between Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton. At the tail end of the property frenzy, with impeccably disastrous timing, developers at last managed to put up a fancy high-rise condo-and-retail behemoth that now dominates the area between the intracoastal waterway and the sea. It was completed just as the boom turned to bust.

It now stands virtually empty. In front are the inevitable palm trees and fountain, but all the retail units are vacant. Across the street towards the beach another lot, meant to be a sister development, is a fenced-off building site with no building going on. The perfectly nice old businesses that once stood there have been razed to the ground; it will surely be years before something rises to replace them.

But eventually South Florida's economy will come back. It always does. That's the lesson of successive economic cycles, from the 1920s boom that brought a frenzy of land development in and around Miami Beach—it turned to bust, but left a lasting legacy. Hurricanes rage, leaving property damaged (parts of Pompano are still clearing up after Wilma three years ago) and insurance rates higher. Yet this is just a pause before another surge of development and another influx of people. All because of the heat—a miracle at Christmas and beyond.

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