About a year ago, on our ‘orientation trip’, I was sitting
in a café checking my emails accompanied by Kenneth, our friendly estate agent.
We were waiting for Claire to come back from some errand. Indefatiguable,
polite to a fault and unflappable, Kenneth had been amazingly patient and helpful, all day. But now, he
seemed agitated and fidgety. He kept pushing his glasses up his nose and
craning over his shoulder. Eventually he plucked up the courage and said to me,
voice trembling a little with excitement.
“Er, excuse me sir? May I go see?”, pointing behind him,
face aglow.
I peered past him. How it had escaped me I don’t know. There,
in the middle of the atrium of the very average shopping centre we were perched
in, was a winter scene straight out of a cartoon. A tree stretching several stories high, festooned with oversized baubles.
Robotic elves and Santa figures, robotic, waving in unison. A grotto that people
were milling in and out of. And huge, shiny presents, snugly buried, invitingly,
in the very convincing fake snow.
Baffled both by this overbearing tableau; Kenneth's
odd deference in feeling he needed my permission to do anything; and his
childlike glee, I faintly nodded.
And off he went, mouth open and eyebrows raised, a picture
of ecstatic joy (like the yet-to-be-conceived John Lewis bear, as he comes over
that hill near the end of the advert. You know the bit I mean? Yeah, that bit). The phone
emerged and he snapped away, a selfie here, a close up of a reindeer there,
like everyone else in the crowd.
Welcome to Hong Kong any time from about mid-November on! It’s
like Christmas in the bigger UK department stores or Oxford Street! But earlier
in the year! In every shopping centre of any size! On crack!
And so begin 2 big themes of the run up to Yule. First, the
ubiquity of not just these scenes, but of watching every person who passes snapping themselves,
their friends, their colleagues, their dogs, their children next to, in and on these scenes.
Hong Kongers go mad for these displays – as Kenneth showed me. Secondly,
what I can only describe as a World War One style arms race between the
shopping centres…but instead of bigger and better naval battle ships, it’s who can pull off the most
ridiculous or outlandish displays.
So you’ve got an actual live band playing Christmas songs in
the grotto at lunchtime? Well, I’ve got singing, waving penguins doing my
music, like, all day.
Oh yeah? Well, check this – I’ve got a moving talking polar
bear, and some singing penguins, and a tree whose lights flash in time
whatever song is playing!
Hah, I’ve got animatronic reindeer, as well as a flashing tree!
So what, my tree has animatronic reindeer emerging from the top of the tree where the
fairy should be and they’re singing!
I exaggerate. But honestly, not that much.
And here’s the thing, though. Yes, it’s kitschy. Yes, it’s
garish. Yes, I do find it odd that it holds such a fascination in one of the
top three most atheistic and not-particularly Christian places on earth. But. It
is, somehow, really charming; and some of the engineering and design that has
gone into these displays is bafflingly complex. It also fits very neatly at the very apex
of Hong Kong’s hyper consumer culture, and the love of all things cutesy – so it
works.
And hey, the whole blog is based on me taking a sodding picture of one of the scenes. And it won’t be the
last I take, either I’m sure. Who knows, in the next one, I may even have to
get a selfie, head-tilted, peace sign, next to a waving puppet Santa inexplicably
singing “White Christmas”…
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