‘Tis the season once again, not only to be jolly and overindulge, but to receive bad presents. The anticipation is high, a relative who often gives you a tenner stuffed in an envelope has given you a gift this year and you want to know what it is. You gingerly peel away the wrapping paper bit by bit to reveal disappointment – and a 50 Cent calendar.
Rubbish presents are now a fundamental part of Christmas and can cause endless confusion: are they carefully thought out gifts from a kind acquaintance who pays too much attention (“Now they have a lot of CDs and may need to transport them one day, I’ll get them CD wallets”) or from a well-intentioned person who stumbled into Poundland and blindly picked up the first thing they see?
One Christmas from years ago stands out in particular for the latter; a family friend was sent out to get presents for us and they were stunning – my six year old sister received Christmas-themed candles and I, clearly a huge fan at four years old, received a Coronation Street annual.
After a little research, I’ve found I’m not the only one on the receiving end of some truly terrible presents.
A close friend of mine was quite upset to receive a key ring from a cracker, especially as the stingy present giver happened to be her boyfriend. Needless to say they’re not together anymore.
Many friends felt that their gift-giver was somewhat out of touch with the recipient’s interests and were often more than a decade over or under their age group. In the over category, one girl was surprised to receive a quality Maeve Binchy novel from a boyfriend and in the under category another friend was surprised to find a Postman Pat money box under his tree at the tender age of 17.
It has to be said that some bad presents can be pretty useful; you shouldn’t run out of shower gels or deodorants too quickly with all those toiletry packs. Furthermore ,not everyone manages to get their five a day, so a yearly orange from your grandmother should help towards that.
Now I know that the reason rubbish presents came into existence (besides chronic ungratefulness) is the increased commercialisation of Christmas, the focus being more on presents and the aching need to get the right gift rather than on the birth of Jesus and the nativity story. Granted, CD wallets are likely to be quite useful at some point in your life, but I think the three wise men got it right with the gift of frankincense, myrrh and gold – even if you don’t find much use for it, you could certainly get a tidy profit from putting them on eBay with all the other bad presents you receive this year.
Happy ungrateful Christmas, FiX readers!
Kate Preston
]]>
As I type this with frozen fingers and even more frozen feet, I’m sure you, like me, are sick of being assaulted by a neverending stream of perfume adverts at this time of year.
I love Christmas. I love the food, I love the goodwill, I even love bad presents. But I’ve never bought perfume on the back of a Christmas advert. For all the things that Christmas is, sexy is not one of them. There’s nothing amorous about me having shovelled down my umpteenth helping of turkey, sat infront of a “best of” TV show while present wrappings adorn the sofa. So why the fascination with the year on year adverts, and why do so many get it so wrong?
Here’s a selection of the best and the worst supposedly enchanting scents you can buy for a loved one this Christmas.
We start off with Dolce & Gabbana’s Rose The One. Scarlett Johannson nonchalantly drapes herself across a bed, with only a smattering of clothes and a bowl of strawberries for company.
The message is “It’s funny what you forget, but you never forget The One”. 30 repeat viewings later, and ironically I’ve forgotten what I was watching.
Next up Chanel No. 5’s typically overblown advertising campaign. Following Catherine Deneuve and Nicole Kidman is Audrey Tautou. Pouting, wide eyed and with an undeniable beauté Française, Tautou is the perfect match for the fragrance. I’ve always loved Chanel’s throw the kitchen sink attitude to advertising, and this lives up to expectation, delivering a gloriously lush and heart-warming short film that is at odds with other brands smug efforts.
Gucci by Gucci has to be one of the worst advertising campaigns of yuletide. I’ve probably shattered a million girl’s hearts with this savage attack on James “Angel Eyes” Franco, but there you go. Franco assures us that “You’re running with me. The world is changing. I will be the same”. Despite this clear admission that he’s a fusty old conservative set in his ways, Franco still does nothing throughout the whole 30 second run except stalk around dark corridors that look like offcuts from the Bourne trilogy. His frankly piss poor attempt at being dark and mysterious falls flat on his face, and remember, this is from a man who thought Spiderman 3 was a good idea.
Bad, bad, bad.
What’s interesting about perfume and aftershave adverts is that it’s very difficult to sell a product you can’t see in action. Sell a Ferrari? Show a clip of it driving very fast. Sell a DIY kit? Show a clip of me chasing down kids with a chainsaw. You get the idea. Perfume isn’t a visual medium, and until we’re all plugged into our TV’s by virtual reality it shall remain so.
So instead what we have is associations of glamour. You too can have chiselled cheekbones and a barrel-like chest like Matthew McConaughey! Just buy The One, by Dolce & Gabbana! And so the great British public are once again, slaves to the charms of celebrity and falsified glamour. Fashion has been victim this to years. Just because something looks good on Kate Moss, does not mean it’ll look good on you on your way to the corner shop…
Still, it’s not all bad. When you’re feeling worse for wear on boxing day, rest assured that all the adverts will have vanished from the schedules, only to be replaced by Boxing Day sales. Who knew that a sofa was such a must-have buy the day after Christmas?
Joseph Stashko-Adamaszek
Single people beware – our favourite Christmas tradition is on the verge of being ruined in a collaboration between swine flu and etiquette specialists Debrett’s.
For time immemorial the unattached among us have always had a smile on our face at the festive end of the year thanks to the white berried plant known as Mistletoe. However, this year your lips may have to be kept to themselves to avoid spreading swine flu, and be replaced with a more health conscious kiss on the cheek. Although the thought of a global pandemic spread by festive kissing is bizarre the warning itself is surprisingly, not the worst of it.
Debrett’s started publishing books on social manners in the mid 1900s to go along with other publications about the social hierarchy of England. Their most famous magnum-opus, Correct Form, was recently updated to include business etiquette and American customs.
However the 18 do’s and do not do’s of mistletoe encounters on their website (www.debretts.com) make for hilarious reading. They encourage people to ‘not be a sleaze with wandering hands’, ‘pick a willing target’ and ‘not to leave a saliva trace. And yes, they could have phrased the last one better.
Also included is the fact that you should never reject a kiss under the mistletoe. What kind of up-tight prudes are they inviting to their Christmas get-togethers?They continue on the anti-swine flu rap informing people it is bad form to kiss the air and to make sound effects. They mean the “mwah” sound by the way before anybody thinks making aeroplane noises are acceptable.
Also included are two points which surely even the the most socially inept of us were aware of.
‘Don’t kiss anyone if you, or they, have a mouthful of food or drink’ (Obviously that could get rather messy or embarrassing if they have been eating twiglets).
‘Keep away from the mistletoe if you’ve had too much to drink – your social skills will be impaired & you don’t want any of those morning-after regrets’.
Now they just want you to have no fun whatsoever. The office Christmas party is the only time you can do this because nobody will remember it the day after. So for the swine flu conscious, avoid any mistletoe and for the daredevils among us walk around with a bit constantly tucked behind your ear.
Either way another Christmas tradition is being slowly eroded away.
Colin Rowe
I was in India recently, and nearing Christmas and engaging in sometimes frivolous conversation with rickshaw drivers and the like, I often asked “what happens at Christmas time here?”. The general consensus was “a really big party”. – Nothing unusual there. But I had to ask, because I had to wonder. There aren’t decorations sprawling streetwards from businesses, or climbing lampposts and strangling trees. Christmas music doesn’t filter from speakers in lifts or lobbies or halls or rooms. There’s very little (if any) advertising for “Christmas bargains!” or anything of the sort.
Across one small span of ocean from India’s east coast however, you will find Christmas has taken on a traditional flavour of the sort we are more used to here in the western world. In Singapore, carols infest almost every space, with version upon version of all of the tunes we’ve come to know. There’s advertising on walls, televisions, radios, buses, trains and their stations – the list is almost endless. And I realise finally, after much detachment from the Christmas that I am used to, that we’re only a matter of days away, and the typical push for consumption and money that we see in the western world is indeed, slowly filtering in to the east.
But why not yet in India? Is this some measure of capitalism’s impression on a nation’s thinking? Is it a sign of just how far Singapore has come, and how far India is from really being the player on the world stage that they are hoping to be? (Don’t tell them). Look up how they celebrate Christmas in for example, Vietnam, Africa, Peru, Samoa or Uzbekistan (all of which aren’t yet dictated by capitalist ideas) and the focus seems to invariably be on celebrating family and feasting (just like India) – not spending and consuming.
The fact of the matter is that now, more so than ever, Christmas is a time when retailers can push consumers to give their profits one last positive kick for the year. It’s the months leading in to it that determine whether or not salespeople hit their targets, and if you’re part of this machine (as we inevitably are in western society), you’ll jump right on to the train of thought that Christmas capitalism teaches. What’s the point of really pushing for that consumer dollar (or rupee, as it were) if they haven’t yet inherited our culture of consumption and growth?
Seriously though, do we (or does anyone) really need an excuse to encourage consumerism in today’s consumption and growth-driven society? Where over-consumption and the inherent consequences of it (pollution, waste, global warming, climate change, death, greed, hunger, excess, detachment, escapism – the list is almost endless) are continuously and increasingly inhibiting and harming our lives and futures.
Are retail and commercial organisations not simply “cashing in on Christmas” in order to improve their bottom line? Is the fact that India wasn’t gearing up for Christmas (even in December) – where big spending of a commercial nature is only now starting to really grow – some measure of their society’s ability (or current inability) to contribute cash to the machine that Christmas has become?
The point isn’t to get back into church, and pick up your bible and speak to “God” (whoever yours might be) on Christmas day. The point is that the capitalist machine further and further infiltrates more and more aspects of our lives, wherever and whenever it can. Getting back in touch with giving thanks for family, friends and our relationships, and sharing merriment ought to be far more important, especially over the behest of capitalism’s grave desire for growth – or should we call it a majority contribution to the destruction of our earth? I’m sure the rest of the world will soon follow suit, because money is most important, right?
Carlos Hurworth