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It used to be that to decorate a place for Christmas you put up all sorts
of wacky red and green and vegetable stuff -- wreaths, holly, candy canes,
plastic candy canes, candy plastic canes, angels, snowflakes, nutcrackers,
trees, sleighs, Santas, baby Jesuses, baby Santas, reindeer, snowmen,
snowwomen, snowmannequins, snowjesuses, and so on.
But lately the science of decorating public spaces for Christmas (or other
religious or secular holidays that happen to coincidentally be exactly like
Christmas because they also fall in the same half of the year) has boiled
it all down to one thing: Giant Christmas ornaments.
Now, Christmas ornaments -- by which I mean red and green spheres hanging
from hooks -- are the most abstract concept of Christmas there is.
Okay, a plastic candy cane or cardboard snowman may not really represent
much in a literal sense, but at least it sort of represents something.
A Christmas ornament, on the other hand, represents "ball of color here."
They're basically big paintball pellets that never quite pop.
At American malls, for some reason, these have swollen to gigantic size.
By the way, my comments only apply to the United States. For instance,
the way you can tell that Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" contain
Fake New York City filmed in London is that there are Christmas ornaments
shaped like giant handlebar mustaches everywhere. In England they put
up facial hair to celebrate Christmas. In the U.S., we're limited to balls.
The Cambridgeside Galleria in Lechmere is three stories tall and has, for
the past many years, been hanging their giant ornaments from the third-floor
ceiling on long ribbons that hang down to just above the ground floor.
The ornaments are about four feet across and seem to be made of cloth,
with a little fan inside to keep them fully inflated. They appear to be
hanging from foot-wide ribbons, but upon closer inspection it's clear
that there are two chains holding up each ornament, with an electrical
cable (for the blower) threaded through one of the chains. (Apparently
there is some sensible fire-code rule that says you can't hang anything
from a loadbearing power line. I guess this means they will never do
an American version of "Thunderbirds", as the way the mouths of those
marionettes were controlled was by voltage applied to the wires holding
their heads up.)
Even though I know the Cambridgeside ornaments are mostly hollow fabric,
and are hanging for nice strong chains, it still makes me uneasy to
have something that large suspended a few feet above my head.
The Prudential mall, in past years, had strung up these very heavy-looking
garlands made of actual spruce boughs and pine cones and stuff. Once in
a while a branch would break off and I always worried that one of the
strings would snap and a hundred pounds of dead trees would swing down
like Tarzan and knock some old lady through the window of Legal Sea Foods.
But this year, they've switched to... giant balls.
And the Prudential has BIG balls.
They're six feet across, and, for some reason, they hang them sideways
with giant hooks sticking out to the side. You like, like the little
bent paper clip thingies used to hang little Christmas ornaments, except
these hooks are about three feet long. They're big enough to fit around
the neck of one of the Ritz Brothers to drag them off your vaudeville
stage. There's something inherently scary about these giant hooks
hanging sideways in midair, even more scary than the scene in
"Five Deadly Venoms" in which the bad guys kill someone by shoving a
hook down his throat to poke his heart. (And I know that my fear of
giant hovering hooks wasn't caused by seeing that kung-fu movie this
week, because the movie also contained a scene where a guy was killed
with a wet paper towel, and I do not have a fear of Bounty.)
But the ultimate in Scary Giant Christmas Ornament Overkill is in the
101 Huntington building (aka "The Belvedere", although I don't know if
its internal construction is modelled on that Escher picture.)
101 Huntington is a new addition to the Prudential mall plaza (it's gone
from being a plaza to a mall to a mall plaza in the ten years I've been
shopping there) and it has the same scary giant ornaments as the rest
of the Prudential complex, except that they didn't have a good place
to hang them.
So the lobby has a pyramid of four of the things, stacked like cannonballs
would be if cannonballs were the size of weather balloons. You can't
walk past this giant pile of four items without some fear that they
will roll away like oranges at the supermarket and you will make headlines
by being the first person crushed by a rolling Christmas ornament.
As if that's not bad enough, the three on the bottom have their hooks
sticking out across the floor ready to snap your ankle when you trip.
The only thing scarier than a Christmas ornament bigger than you are
would be a garland of popcorn where each threaded popped kernel is
bigger than you are... and bleeding profusely from its stigmata.
What's with the exponential growth of Christmas ornaments in public places?
How big are the public Christmas ornaments where you live?
Any idea abt giant christmas ornaments? |
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Not unless you're an episode of "The Time Tunnel" or a brand of canned chili.
And if you ARE a brand of canned chili, I like mine less lumpy! But then again, you can say that about lots of things. Given time,
and some gamma radiation, almost anything could evolve into a Christmas tree.
Especially a glowing purple one that revolves all the time and goes
"mwowm, mwowm, mwowm, mwowm" as it pulsates, oscillates, scintillates,
coruscates, and annihilates.
They've known this in Japan for years. What was the name of that movie
about Giant Christmas Tree Purplidon crushing the Ginza? I forget who
played Santa in that one -- was it Pinky Lady as Santa, or Panty Cat? |
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