The Malling of Christmas

It's Christmas time, and I'm workin' in the mall. Which would be fine, if only the mall Christmas decor weren't so homogenized. It's depressing to see nothing but a bunch of fake evergreen boughs hung up, with a dumb tree tower made up of (likely plastic) poinsettias.

Which mall am I talking about? Doesn't matter, really. One mall is the same as the next - same stores, same displays, same layout. . . same Christmas decorations. It's a shame. Once upon a time, different towns and cities in different parts of the country had Christmas displays and events as unique as the big-city department stores (now owned by one or two conglomerates) of yore. A few of those traditions still survive - Boston's annual Pops Orchestra gala, New York's window displays and Radio City show, the Christmas fountain light show at John Wanamaker in Philadelphia (now a Lord and Taylor, but to me it will always be Wanamaker's! And don't you forget it!) - but for the most part, local Christmas traditions have gone by the wayside. In Caldwell, New Jersey, the local specialty department store featured a giant tree made out of white lights on its roof. Also, you could see Santa Claus in his parlor and get something warm and sweet to eat or drink at Santa's kitchen. The store dropped the tree years ago, and Santa's kitchen bit the dust later; now, as I noted this past January, the store itself is gone.

Perhaps one of the greatest victims of corporate Scrooge/Grinch homogenization was Newark, whose Bamberger's department store had the most gorgeous and elaborate Christmas displays when my mother was a little girl. Then came the 1967 riot, white flight to the suburbs, and the Bamberger's mall locations that, along with the original Newark store, got bought by and renamed Macy's. The Newark store closed in 1992, and a discount drugstore occupies part of its first floor now. Even that, though, is a better fate than what became of Hudson's in Detroit, which was torn down after it closed to make way for a parking lot - long after that city's race rioting and white abandonment. Christmas in America, like America itself, is so airbrushed and homogenized, it's no wonder ethnic diversity has replaced geographical diversity - and why so many black Americans have ditched Christmas for Kwanzaa in protest.

I'm wondering if I should ditch it for the Irish holiday of St. Stephen's Day on December 26. :-(