Panic spread in certain Manhattan parental networks when a rumor buzzed around last week that Saks Fifth Avenue was canceling Christmas. Or canceling its winter-season windows, anyway. Known for being excessively devoted to displays of holiday cheer as I am, I received two urgent texts on the matter from mom friends on the Upper West Side and NoLIta. The rumor turned out to be untrue: Saks Fifth Avenue is canceling its annual holiday light show, a seasonal spectacular that at different points over the last 20 years has featured Elton John singing “Your Song,” fireworks over 49th and Fifth, mountains of stage-prop sugar candy, dancing snowflakes, angels’ trumpets, and Dior’s spinning Carousel of Dreams — but the window displays themselves shall live on.
I’ve never seen the Saks light show, so I don’t really care that it’s been canceled due to budgetary constraints, but I will admit that I’m glad the department store windows will still provide a visual feast of rhinestone icicles and diamond “ice” for the cranky shoppers of December. I remember the “Frozen”-themed windows of 2014, which my then-tiny kids and I visited as wide-eyed tourist bumpkins from Nova Scotia, and, if memory isn’t failing me, I think there may have been an animatronic Mouse King from “The Nutcracker” in the Saks windows at some point in the late 1990s.
Due to our own budgetary constraints over here on Edwards Lane this holiday season, I’m attempting to put the accent on décor in
this house, too, rather than the actual shopping. There will be much centerpiece-making, mantelpiece-decking, candle-dipping, and a springerle-cookie exchange, and we are starting early. This week, in fact. The sturdy wire frame you use to fashion a homemade door wreath has been removed from the back of the coat closet and the clippers are waiting by the front door for my nocturnal raid on a certain relative’s evergreen shrubbery; this relative did tell me I could help myself to some English ivy and some holly berries, but that was four or five years ago, and it’s possible I’m the only one who remembers or thinks I still have permission. No matter! Who would begrudge a cousin a few snips of evergreen?
We are swimming upstream against the mighty current of all-consuming consumerism as Black Friday approaches. Have you heard about this viral trend among teens and tweens in which they have been creating actual PowerPoint presentations for their parents of all the presents they expect to find packed and parceled under the perfect plastic pine tree? It’s pernicious. (I’m told it’s unfeminist and awful to use the term “tweens” but I find it pithy, so I’m persisting.) It goes like this: Kid watches too much TikTok, having hacker-bypassed mom and/or dad’s pathetic screen-time limits on their iPhone and — like all the girls between the ages of 9 and 18 in the Western Hemisphere this year, and I mean of them in lockstep — decides that Santa will bring them, very, very specifically: Lululemon yoga pants, crop tops from Skims, a retro Polaroid camera, a Cartier “Love” bracelet, gingerbread man shortie pajamas from Roller Rabbit, a Van Cleef Alhambra clover necklace retailing for $2,830, and Baccarat Rouge 540 eau de parfum retailing at $210 for 1.4 ounces.
One of the Upper West Side moms who had texted me about the Saks panic told me with evident amusement and pride, a year ago, about how her daughter had, yes, outrageously luxurious demands for Hanukkah, but had at least been clever enough to wow the grown-ups over dinner one November evening with one of these “Presents I Want” PowerPoints. I had to break the news that the kids’ Santa slide shows are made on demand by the A.I. design algorithms of Canva and that her 11-year-old had 90 percent wish-list crossover with my then-16-year-old. They’re all tapped into the same consumerist hive mind.
Never mind!
We are going to go on our annual excursion to the city anyway, and there will be public singing of “Santa Baby” and the now-teenagers will willingly ride to Manhattan with one of my special, trademark holiday treat boxes on their lap. This we can afford: You take a small baked-good-presentation box adorned with reindeer or peppermint stripes or whatever — the kind you hand to a teacher with sugar cookies or apple-spice cake in it — and you fill it with foil-wrapped chocolate ornaments, sandwiches cut out in the shape of stars, and festive holly-berry or snowy-scene napkins. Saturday of next week, Nov. 30, is Small Business Saturday, and, hot tip, you can avail yourself of the occasion to buy yourself some cardboard goody-presentation boxes at the Sag Harbor Variety Store.
Nov. 30 is also the day that we will be judging the Holiday Spirit Window Décorating Contest, which The Star is running with an assist from the Anchor Society and the Greater East Hampton Chamber of Commerce. It’s pretty simple: A small panel of judges will pick a favorite storefront display, and the winning shop will get a basket of cheer and a profile in the newspaper of record.
The contest was spurred on by a Letter to the Editor a year ago from a Star reader who bemoaned the sterility of the retail vista in December, when so many storefronts are left blank and empty. Lights on but nobody home. We have asked the shopkeepers and store managers to zhuzh it up this year. Pile on the Fraser fir, the garlands of balsam, the gargantuan red ribbons, the berries real or faux, the elves in pointy felt shoes, the vintage ice skates and sleds, the big spinning dreidels. Bring on the hollow plastic Saint Nicks, too. There’s no such thing as bad taste at Christmas. In fact, if you try to be too tasteful, that’s where you go wrong. You end up with all-white lights on the tree and plain, modern glass bowls filled with clear-glass ornaments as the centerpiece at the feast. Good taste is bad taste in December.
My own memories of Newtown and Main Street are colored — and scented — by the tempera paint we used in middle school to adorn the stores’ windows with awkwardly rendered pumpkins, autumn leaves, and Thanksgiving cornucopias that looked more like undercooked croissants than horns of plenty. Back in the day. Way back in the day, when Main Street bustled year round and 9-year-olds never dreamed of $80 booty shorts.
We may not be able to give the children a Van Cleef necklace, but we can give them the bright colors of cheap wrapping paper, a Thermos of hot chocolate made with Dutch-process cocoa, and the indelible sense memory of how chilly the tip of the nose becomes when pressed to the storefront glass.