My old fella’s just told me that purple is now the ’in’ colour. He should know. With precious little else to do over the festive season he learned about it while reading Saga magazine from cover to cover.
Then, feeling bored, he dragged me and my best mate to Boundary Mill at Colne, Lancashire, where the middle-aged, middle-class clientele shop ’til they drop inveigled by eye-popping supposed discounts of up to 75%.
Knowing who else hails from Grantham it’s no surprise that this scion of the entrepreneurial spirit has a branch there, allowing old fogies to forget momentarily that when they wake up on the first full working day of the New Year they’ll join the rest of the free world in what is likely to be the worst economic recession since the 1930s.
Our gang purchased relatively little as, unlike previous visits to the ‘gradely’ mill, we found few real bargains. We were left thinking how easy it is to place wildly inflated ‘original’ price tickets on goods only to mark them down to make them half-way saleable.
My mate more than fancied a couple of cute jackets and skirts. But she found it difficult to match her size and then discovered a button missing from one jacket and a badly pulled thread on the other. When, at my suggestion, she asked an assistant if a further discount were available on the jacket missing a button, she was told ‘no’, as spare buttons were included. That, surely, was hardly the point. As she intended to buy something new it should have been of ‘merchantable quality’ without need of repair. But she was only one of thousands of people gawping at their majestic emporium that day, so I guess Lord and Lady Boundary gave nary a hoot that they lost a sale.
After all, we become a captive audience once we’ve parked up in the middle of nowhere on the M65. Moreover, most shoppers travel some distance to get there, so even if they don’t grab much in the way of swag, they’ll certainly need to buy refreshments before they leave.
Thus our little day out ended on the same note of malcontent as inspired the entire holiday. How could we enjoy ourselves fully when we continued to be terrified of the economic woes the New Year would bring? Don’t tell me, à la Roosevelt, that there’s nothing to worry about. We sell bargain books and gifts - bits of happiness - and if people don’t feel good, they won’t buy.
Inevitably, the festive period produces outpourings of drivel from people trying to explain what it’s like NOT to celebrate Christmas. It’s even worse in a year like 2008 when there’s an overlap between Christmas and Chanucah, the Jewish Festival of Lights.
Au fond, the most we achieve is a mixed message and the only person in my memory to have explained this with elegance and clarity was the BBC’s Israel correspondent, the late Michael Elkins, in his famous broadcast, A Jew At Christmas.
Although I come from a home which managed to synthesise the two fairly happily in a typical 1950s Anglo-Jewish way, I still remember the pang when I was forbidden, aged five, to play an angel in the school nativity play and was relegated instead to sit round the piano singing carols in a coat festooned with cotton wool balls representing snow flakes. I also remember being in trouble when I told classmates they were silly to believe in Father Christmas when my main Chanucah gift was a siddur (Hebrew prayer book) from my father as I’d just learned to read Hebrew. Meanwhile, I was advised it was OK to sing hymns like All Things Bright and Beautiful and to recite The Lord’s Prayer because neither was specificially ‘Christian’.
Now, ours was a reasonably content (complacent?) middle-of-the-road nominally Orthodox family and we sneered at other Jewish families who succumbed to the Xmas atmosphere allowing trees, decorations and presents for ‘the wrong reason’.
And while Chanucah generally was celebrated much less elaborately then than now - the reason for the relatively modest gift, which incidentally I still have 50 years on - it didn’t stop my mother cooking a ‘holiday bird’ or our enjoying other festive treats like a trip to a panto or a Chanucah party organised by the local synagogue complete with a film show, sweets and gelt (money) donated by the community bigwig.
So am I just being sour when I ask if, as the current festive season wends to its tacky close, all the cheer has just been sheer bravado?
I certainly felt mean a couple of weeks before the holiday when I met a charming (non-Jewish) lady who said whatever happens she simply loves Christmas. Why not? Christmas Day also happens to be her birthday!
