For years, every Christmas, my parents used to pull out a cardboard box from under the stairs and out would come the ‘garlands’, that they probably had bought for their first Christmas together – which would be 1935. As well as the extensible garlands that folded back into quite a flat little pack there were paper bells and spheres that opened out from their own little flat packs and were held open by thin metal strips. I do believe that our decorations were British made. Well, where else would they have come from if not from Britain? They were well made too and this was probably the reason why Mother and Father did not feel the need to buy imported decorations, not even twenty or even twenty-five years after the end of WW2. Those 1935 purchases turned out to be good investments.
Things have changed. For years now British homes have been decorated at Christmas courtesy of the Chinese. The Chinese have cornered the market.
It is a strange, and to me, a pleasing thing that our culture which has for a long time encouraged free thought and tolerance of all religions, whilst being ‘officially’ Christian, has embraced a huge number of people – perhaps even a majority – who are both non-Christian yet are totally in accord with what might be termed Christian values. By non-Christian I mean not worshipping, not practising, not church or chapel going, not believing in God or any of the other markers of Christianity. As a nation we are, or at least we try to be, Christian in our behaviour particularly as it relates to our treatment of others. Look at the Christian values to which we aspire and as often as not achieve: we are a tolerant people, we are fair-minded, we believe in justice and democracy, we are generous, forgiving, independent and so on. We are so kind and even handed we buy most if not all of our Christmas decorations from China which is officially and for all practical purposes atheist and does not espouse Christian values. That this should be so is … ironic at least.
Of course what we all want is pretty, shiny things at the lowest possible price for Christmas and the Chinese are pretty good at supplying them but wouldn’t it be nice if we could make pretty shiny things ourselves as we used to do? Or perhaps we could encourage other people who are in the state now that the Chinese were when my Mother scolded me for leaving my cabbage, to make them and for us to buy our trinkets from them.
There is an economic reason for doubting the wisdom of spending so much money on goods from China; it has made them very wealthy. So wealthy that they probably now have the power to make it impossible for us to buy our Christmas goodies from them if they choose – by virtue of our likely to be flat broke quite soon.
There’s a man I know who bought a house in Portugal more than twenty years ago. He was enormously proud of his view that gave him a lovely landscape and beyond that there was the sea; the view faced west as well so he had sunsets. Living in England he could not maintain the house and garden so he found a local man and paid him well to keep everything up to scratch. This Englishman was looking forward to his retirement and planned to spend much of his time in his lovely house in Portugal. What he didn’t spot at first was that someone was building a house right in front of his. Quite close. Close enough to steal most of the view. The house is finished now and the Englishman is very unhappy: particularly when he discovered that the man who had built the offending house was ‘his’ man, his house and garden maintenance man, and he had unwittingly funded this unfortunate development over the previous twenty years.
When I think about this story, which is true, quite true, I think about the Chinese and their relationship with us. It is surely time for us Brits to make our own pretty, shiny Christmas decorations and if we can’t summon up the energy then we should find a poorer nation, preferably one that is sympathetic to the reasons why we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, to do it for us.
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