The Great Festival

Nineveh saw nothing like it, Imperial Rome would have been abashed, and Solomon, in all his glory, could not have afforded it. It is America's great Christmas festival,

Across the nation, U.S. cities burst into calculated and bravura finery. Bright color blossomed where there was none before, drab public spaces were bathed in light, and people kissed (cheek to social cheek) who had never kissed before. As everyone knows--if reminded--Christmas Day itself marks the birth of Christ. But it is sometimes hard to remember in the weeks before. Instead, the chief big man seems to be that fellow Santa Claus, the patron saint of giving. Pillowed and pastyfaced, he chortles from a myriad of department-store thrones, and pasteboard likenesses beam from drugstore windows. Under his spell, the battle cry in thousands of U.S. homes becomes:

Now Bonwit's! Now Bergdorf's!

Now Magnin's and Jax!

On Neiman! On Marcus! On Schwartz's and Saks!

Pagan Rights. As usual, there is considerable hand-wringing by purists and priests, who complain that the cash box has replaced the creche. But the fact remains that Christmas never completely belonged to the church. It began as a pagan festival, and it has slowly been changing back into one for the past half-century.

Long before the birth of Christ, Dec. 25 was celebrated in pagan societies as the day on which the sun began its yearly rebirth (astronomically they were only three days off). Peasants in northern Europe decorated their homes with evergreens as a tribute to nature's victory over the numbing winter, held lengthy feasts and processionals. The Romans celebrated' the entire winter solstice season to honor Saturn, the god of agriculture. During the Saturnalia everyone ate, drank and exchanged presents in one long bacchanal. When the Christian missionaries began to comb the countryside for converts, they found that few were willing to give up their pagan rites. Figuring that pragmatism was called for, they combined the two holidays into the mixture of religious and secular customs that remains today.

Changed Tide. The church held the edge until the middle of the 19th century. Then Clement Moore and Charles

Dickens turned the tide, implanted the idea that presents and not piety were what Christmas was all about.

A sober poet and scholar, Moore dashed off A Visit From Saint Nicholas, better known as The Night Before Christmas, in 1822 as a fanciful amusement for his own children. Little did he know that his poem would eventually change the image of Saint Nicholas around the world.

In his original incarnation in the 4th century, Nicholas was not much of a saint. He accumulated virtue by giving gifts to children and marriageable maidens. But he was also a lean and righteous priest who dispensed his gifts with an eye for punishing the unworthy as well as rewarding the virtuous. Moore's jolly, open-handed Santa changed all that. Then came Dickens and A Christmas Carol in 1843. Within 20 years--thanks in part to countless readings by Dickens himself--Bob Cratchit and his lame son, Tiny Tim, had become the heroes of the holiday, and many an otherwise prudent man plunged into debt to avoid any likeness to Scrooge.

Heart & Purse Strings. About the same time, American stores began to take over the trappings of Christmas. Nativity scenes, once seen only in churches and private homes, began to crop up in display windows along with wreaths, Christmas trees and sugarplums. Lights, originally lit by homeowners and clergymen to guide Christ through the darkness to their doors, now were set out to attract customers. One of the first stores to tug at the heart strings as well as the purse strings was Altman's in Manhattan, which began to dress its windows with a simple wreath the day before Christmas in the 1870s. By the turn of the century, the decorations had already become fantastically elaborate and increasingly secular. San Francisco's Emporium boasted that it had "the largest, most beautiful and fascinating Christmas show ever produced in a mercantile establishment in this country." It consisted of dolls frolicking in the summer sea at Coney Island.

The shops soon took the next logical step, banded together to decorate entire streets and squares, sometimes with their own funds, sometimes with help from the city. The Christmas festival became public, and ever since, merchants have worked to expand the season backward to the point where today virtually every store is decked out in its Christmas finery by or before Thanksgiving.

Monorails & Ho-Hos. Whatever the motives of the producers, nobody can dispute the fact that the results are spectacular. Rich's department store in Atlanta spends so much money on Christmas decorations that it does not even keep track, but estimates that it might reach $150,000. This Thanksgiving night, as it has for the past 18 years, the store held its annual tree-lighting ceremony. While 150,000 people milled about below, four choirs were marshaled on each of the four floors of a glass-enclosed bridge over a pedestrian mall. Beginning at the bottom, they broke into song as the floors successively came alive with lights. The whole ceremony was topped off when the 2,000 lights on the 65-ft. white pine on top of the bridge twinkled on and everyone in the crowd joined in singing Silent Night.

But this is just the opening. For the next four weeks, two pink monorails with pig faces for fronts (they are dubbed "the Pink Pigs") will carry young customers around the tree. Inside the store, three Santas, carefully screened so that no two can be seen by the same wide-eyed child, dispense ho-hos and listen to wishes. In case the kids get restless waiting in line, Rich's has obligingly placed eight live reindeer in glass cages near by.

Late Rebellion. Many of the best displays are community efforts. San Francisco businessmen traditionally decorate downtown Union Square with 16 tall Irish yew trees, each festooned with hundreds of colored lights. In Fort Worth, Texas, which is short on snow but long on spirit, twelve tall buildings in the city's hub are silhouetted with yellow and white lights. The inside lights are doused in the late evening, leaving a striking skyline of bright geometric patterns.

But in general, community action is of relatively recent date. As late as 1950, Boston, for instance, still clung to the tradition of its original Puritan Governors, who thought of Christmas as "the awesome event of the Incarnation" and forbade any public display. Then the town fathers rebelled and decided to decorate Boston Common. The decision once made, no expense was spared, and no community square is done with" more style. Thousands of white, orange and blue lights are laced across the bare branches of the park's old elms and spruce trees set up for the occasion. From a distance, the entire network looks like an illuminated spider web. During the day, visitors are treated to a Nativity scene that features 75 identical white sheep with one black sheep at the head of the flock. Cost of the Common's display--known to cynical Bostonians as "Christorama"--is a relatively small $32,500, most of it donated by local merchants, banks and insurance companies. Since the Common got its Christmas facial, stores' sales have increased by 2% annually, last year jumped by 5%. Savs Paul Hines, head of the festival committee: "It's almost as if the Almighty is blessing our efforts to glorify him."

Dancing Girls. For sheer pomp and pageantry, however, no city can light a candle to New York. At dusk, virtually every square foot of street frontage in midtown Manhattan comes alive with winking wreaths, sparkling and mechanized mannequins. For the 20th year, Christmas trees will divide Park Avenue for 62 blocks with a band of light. At Herald Square, Macy's windows add an Eastern accent with some 200 animated figures, ranging from girls dancing in mosques (a practice not allowed by Moslems) to silk-garbed courtiers watching performing jugglers. Across the street its archrival, Gimbel's, counters with a real-life Santa who descends a wooden chimney every 15 minutes, talks through a microphone to the kids on the street, and--of course--invites everyone inside. Even the minor squares are dressed to the nines. The graceful Pulitzer Memorial fountain in front of the staid Plaza Hotel and Bergdorf Goodman's sparkles as if electricity were going out of style tomorrow.

On Fifth Avenue the competition produces some of the most breathtaking displays in the country. The prize for gaudiness goes to E. J. Korvette's, which prides itself on a huge semicircular tree of lights that juts out from the building's side and shines for 20 blocks. Claiming that religious themes cannot be handled with discretion, Lord & Taylor plays out its "Christmas Is Love" theme with nuzzling poodles, smooching skunks and necking giraffes.

Sweaty Santas. Though the U.S. has made the Christmas pageant what it is today, other countries have recognized a good thing when they see it. Two weeks ago, some 100,000 mothers and children crowded into Rio de Janeiro's Flamengo Park and watched a helicopter approach. Everyone burst into a frenzied shout when it finally touched down and disgorged a befurred Santa Claus, sweating gamely in the 90DEG heat.

Parisian stores, which ten years ago had no U.S.-style decorations, have suddenly realized a few sprigs of holly and strings of lights can help part a Frenchman and his francs. The leader of the movement is Christian Dior. Each Dior window features a Christmas tree standing on a terrace at Versailles (that citadel of un-Christian morals). Inside, mannequins topped with Marie Antoinette hairdos and draped with Dior hostess gowns hold aloft model reindeer and--of all things--old sailing boats. From the ceiling hang huge plastic chandeliers, each of which took 300 hours to make. Said Decorator Jean-Franc,ois Daigre: "My aim has been to create so much light and color that people will want to enter what is normally a rather mysterious place."

Giant Jeweled Necklace. Both here and abroad, the traditional religious themes are losing ground in favor of secular, abstract decorations. London's Regent Street, which for twelve years has provided the backdrop for illuminated displays of reindeer, angels and the magi, has gone completely abstract. The stores along the street, which pay for the display according to their store frontage, this year hit upon a giant jeweled necklace consisting of eleven sections made up of 33 hexagonal frames wrapped in gilt tinsel. In the center of each hexagon is a three-foot star, and at the bottom of each dangles yet another star embedded with silver reflectors. Explains one of the designers: "Father Christmas is losing his charm. Even cribs are less popular. People want something different."

Store managers, in general, figure that the theme does not matter so long as the display catches the eye. Comments the display director for a big department store outside Washington: "Decorations act as a little alarm clock to tell people that Christmas is just around the corner. They are a way to remind people that if they wait until the last minute they won't get their shopping done."

If this approach seems too coolly commercial, there is a school which argues that perhaps Christ should indeed be taken out of Christmas--or at least out of the stores. These critics are less offended by totally secular displays than they are by the sanctimonious or hyprocritical use of religious ones--creches in store windows, a Madonna presiding over the liquor-and-gift-basket department. In the U.S.'s mixed society, "the emphasis is to bypass our differences and get away from the controversy of Christmas," says Professor Dan Dodson, chairman of the sociology department at New York University. "We try to water down the holiday to make it less barbed for people of non-Christian faiths, and this results in a mass culture which erodes away sharp differences."

Man to Man. Thus the Christmas season has been slowly transformed, however inadvertently, from a festival celebrating the relation of man to his God into one celebrating man's good will toward other men. And in their own way, sometimes gaudy, sometimes tasteless, sometimes spectacular, the glowing public displays contribute to the transformation. Take New York, where the installation and decoration of the huge tree at the heart of Rockefeller Center is an annual ritual. Every New Yorker feels compelled to make his own judgment, disapproving or enthusiastic or deprecatory, on the current version. It is one of the few times that this city of strangers, commuters, dissenters, and people who wish they were living someplace else, has a common subject.

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