Lighten our darkness!

The advent of cheap, low-power LED lighting bulbs in illuminated Christmas decorations promised a whole new age in widely available vulgarity to mark the festive season.

Multi light icicles, once a simple, effective and striking illumination for select stores are now cheap clichés.

Moving lights, something like a waving Santa, once the preserve of large companies and institutions are now within the most restricted of budgets and available from cut-price stores. The Brave New World of domestic festive light pollution, viewed by Aunt Bet in the super affluent commuter belt outside New York years ago, has now come to the most straitened inner city ghettos around Europe.

The hopes for municipal magnificence in terms of Christmas lighting were therefore high. And they seemed justified as sheets of lights replaced staid decorations. The lights may have been smaller, but there were more of them and they gave the impression of plenty.

The overall effect is still good and, as long as you don’t look too closely, the impression that you get from endlessly repeated strings of lights is one of expense and opulence.

But look a little more closely and you begin to see that those same lights which were guaranteed thousands of hours of life are not living up to their promise and in every decoration that I have looked at there are the tell tale spots of black which indicate failure.

In most it is not just black spots but whole sections that are not working. In Castelldefels the decorations lining the main road parallel to us had malfunctioning sections of the decorations within one night of their being switched on!

I feel myself imitating a desperate clergyman looking around for something topical on which to base his sermon when I see the creeping failure of gaudy Christmas decorations as a metaphor for the whole of capitalist society.

You have it all: flashy outward show, but look closer and the cracks of failure beginning to show. Even in the public demonstration of governmental care, the festive bread-and-circuses of pretty lighting to keep the people quiet the basic contradictions of our unequal society are illuminated by the darkness of the malfunctioning lamps.

There’s a lot more where that came from as my mind gathers up the unconsidered trifles of everyday experience and finds more and more parallels between cheap, cheerful and shoddy decorations and the vicissitudes of modern life.

But mental exhaustion prompts silence!

Now that I’ve noticed this glaring lack of perfection, I am seeing tawdry failed showmanship in all the decorations everywhere: real and imagined; concrete and metaphorical.

Just the sort of spirit you need to celebrate!

The Catalans are a ‘careful’ people (in the West Walian sense) and are proud to term themselves so. When it comes to wrapping Christmas presents they avail themselves of the facilities which are provided by the main supermarkets. At this time of the year a section of the space outside the tills is given over to the provision of tables set out with rolls of free paper and sellotape dispensers. There are also pairs of scissors for trimming off the excess that I for one always seem to have in abundance at the ends of the semi wrapped present.

Carme has shown me the way here by drawing off yards of paper, rolling it up and stowing it safely away for use at home! Caprabo in Sant Boi is obviously wise to this as they have stationed a formidable no-nonsense lady to asses your gift covering needs and issue what she considers sufficient paper for your task. I had to scrounge a remnant from previous present wrappers to finish Toni’s present because I did not have enough courage to return Oliver-like to such an imperious lady!

I shall steal from the much more relaxed Carrefour.