With only 5 days to go until Christmas, it’s clear that this year there is next to nothing that people really want or need in the shops. After years of new technological innovations, gadgets and gizmos – it seems the world is somewhat light on originality right now.
Many retailers only stay in business because of the success of a good trading period over Christmas and therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to most to hear people talking about the inevitable consequences of the coldest December on record having an impact on trading figures. No doubt we’re in for interesting winter sales period and potentially more big brands going under in the first or second quarter of 2011.
In this time of fractured families, over-connection, under-privacy and general high standards of living – what is left for us to look forward to as a society? What does the festive season really bring us other than headaches about having to put up with long disinterested relatives or mashups of Jamie Oliver’s culinary expertise, without the hint of patience required to ignore mother-in-law’s set methodology for doing things?
It seems a long time since the religiosity of Christmas was the real key to the festive period in public consciousness. The Beeb manage to slip a few traditional references into their schedule, a sprinkling of Jesus here and a waft of ‘services’ there but that’s almost it. The Christmas scheduling starts weeks before Christmas itself and as early as second week in November, the graphical idents change to have a seasonal flavour centring around snow, Santa and fabulous oversizes trees. The over complication of a simple set of stories handed down over generations, both that of Jesus and the supplementary Old St Nic, have left us having to try to find new ways of milking this over-baked time of year. If Jesus was Xmas 1.0 and Santa – the Coca-Cola infused St Nicholas as 2.0 – surely we’re on the edge of culturally void Christmas v3.0 now firmly establishing itself. And what might this look like for our children and children’s children?
In my lifetime I’ve experience both ends of the festive season – 10 years of singing in a church choir as a boy brought me as close to the story of the nativity as most can get – including one year actually performing for the BBC in a barn on the top of a hill with real donkey in the hay. On the flip side I’ve spent periods where I’ve done nothing but begrudgingly sit and play bored games (note, this is the correct spelling as far as I’m concerned) and trough through as much ‘bird’ as possible (with trimmings) – eager to move on to the rapid opening of items with a 1 in 5 likelihood of still being present in my collection of valuable belongings in 12 months time. The rest, likely to end up at the charity shop.
I’ve gone from quality to quantity, back to quality and quantity and now I arrive at 2010 aged 33, dumbfounded by having run out of things to buy people, sentiments to share that sound genuine when people have heard them all before and having lost my father.
But to me, the spirit of Christmas isn’t in the gifts, the food or the waxing and waning levels of self loathing and dissatisfaction with board games. It’s in what my father saw. Christmas is a time for music.
Some of the most wonderful pieces of music, both popular and classic have been written to capture the essence and magic surrounding the stories of Christmas. Tails of great journeys, of hope, of newness and birth, of wonder and truth – togetherness and joy. The music that plays against a backdrop of a cold winters night in the reverberant churches, concert halls and cathedrals of these isles carry in the wind and warm the hearts of all but the very staunchly anti-festive types. The ‘bah-humbugs’ of this world struggle not to be penetrated by the music of the season and to me, the greatest childhood memories are to be found in the innocence of the lone boy singing Once In Royal David’s City or the folk songs found most recently in the social commentaries retold on Sting’s ‘If On A Winters Night’ album from around the country.
But for all the music that has come and gone, Xmas 3.0 brings – with it’s non-Santa, non-Jesus commercial rhetoric – the biggest threat to the furthering of this great tradition of wonderful music in the form of the X factor and the overplaying of the Christmas number one, which invariably has no connection with the period at all – it’s just a song, written by someone other than the artist performing it – geared for sales purposes and not with the slightest attempt to add to an impressive collection of Christmas ‘greatest hits’ in the winter air.
Maybe, however, this is no different a form a social commentary than the traditional carols or folk songs told at their time. Is it that Xmas 3.0 is actually about the sterilisation of culture such that seasons have no impact on musical popularity in the same ways that you can buy ripe tomatoes and peppers out of season thanks to international food trading markets and your local Tesco. Has Simon Cowell simply shown us that our 24/7, reality obsessed society treats its festive seasons in the UK with as much whitewash as everything else around us? Bland Britain is never more acutely in sight than during the modern festive period. Every High Street, every radio station, every shop is selling us everything and nothing. Nothing carries meaning any more and the Christmas no.1 isn’t even vaguely related to Xmas, it’s just a peak trading week for sales.
So as a active contributor to this new social commentary, to the acceptance of Xmas 3.0 by being a ‘consumer’ – what will my children be singing instead of Jive Bunny or Slade on the assumption that the increasing secularisation will mean that John Taverner’s ‘The Lamb’ will be a long forgotten part of seasonal music history by they time they get here. The honest answer is I don’t know. Something of substance people, please.
I guess it’s still true to say that every Christmas, we seem to follow the progress of a ‘rising star’ in this new pop culture we’ve manufactured for ourselves on the back of judgement by two wise men and a pretty Geordie. I for one still prefer the music that was born to retell the story of a rising star that appeared in the sky and made it’s way to a little town called Bethlehem, bringing with it three wise men baring gifts for an infant.
If on a winter’s night……
