Tyler Brûlé - Why Christmas needs to make a comeback

New York used to do a brilliant job at Christmas. Over the past two decades, however, corporate-fuelled political correctness has done a wonderfully efficient job of extinguishing one of the biggest holidays on western calendars. And so, paradoxically, in their drive to avoid offending some customers, they’ve managed to forget that many of the trappings that have been stripped from the retail experience have also left stores feeling rather dull and flat. What consumers have been left with is a sort of holiday mush that doesn’t mean much to anybody and results in a lot of very confused window-dressers and visual merchandisers.


December 2008 should be the time for Christmas to make its big, global comeback. Many world leaders are sitting around thinking about how to stimulate year-end spending and are failing to recognise that the solution is sitting on the calendar. Sadly, few possess the Christmas nuts to go down in the basement and pull out all the decorations and really go for it.

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