Chasing those Christmas movie moments across London
I used to love Christmas. Or perhaps I should say I loved the idea of Christmas as it was portrayed in the 1994 Disney classic ‘The Santa Clause’. If you missed this momentous cinema moment, all you need to know is that it had cutesy North Pole toy workshops, lots of elf-delivered hot cocoa and Tim Allen with a snow globe who made all children happy. Between the ages of 5 and 9 (?!) I basically took the movie as a documentary of what goes on at the North Pole in December and it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling every Christmas. But eventually there came a day when I started flinching at the movie’s blatant fat phobia and I finally got the Claus/Clause pun – i.e. the Tim Allen spell was broken. Since then, every Christmas I have ended up chasing the experiences that would approximate my reality as much as possible to the magic I felt from the movie. This year was no exception.
First stop: Mayfair Christmas Market
Oh Mayfair. You only need to know two details about this London neighbourhood to get the picture. It’s where Leonardo DiCaprio picked up my friend’s friend on a night out and it’s where you can find a fur shop called ‘Furever’, unironically. If I was able to find a life-size decorative polar bear anywhere in London, it would be here. When I arrived at Green Park station one late November Saturday, I got vomited onto the street with hundreds of fellow Christmas fanatics just before the station was shut due to overcrowding. There only ever lies one faulty TFL service between glamorously browsing Furever and people going absolutely feral. Christmas magic ingredients so far: Limbs and anger.
When we finally advanced to the Christmas market one street down, we barely made it to the stalls. Squeezing my face between shoulders and Christmas hats I briefly glimpsed faux-wooden huts, candy canes and a Santa with a REAL (!?!) beard all doused in aggressive amounts of synthetic snow. I dare you not to feel Christmessy. Keen to enjoy our beverages without a side of heavy elbowing, we bought takeaway hot chocolates without alcohol for £9 (!!!!!) and sat in the foyer of a Curzon cinema to catch-up in peace. My hunt for that Christmas spirit could wait another day. Oh holy night.
Second stop: The local community centre
With the angry faces of thwarted Christmas shoppers still haunting my nights, I vowed to do better the following weekend by visiting the Christmas market at our local community centre far from Central London. Entering the beige linoleum-floored gym, I discovered the first law of London Christmas: the density of the crowd is proportional to the abundance of Christmas decorations. With nothing more than a splattering of tinsel in sight, we were able to circulate around the stalls relatively freely. After 5 minutes we had seen everything and bought a mug with the local clock tower as to not leave empty-handed. Pointless consumption surely being another key Christmas ingredient?
Stop 3: Selfridges
Fate had it that we were emptying our flat to move to a different country at the time of year, when it feels most essential to the seasonal spirit to overload your four walls with all kinds of necessary trinkets. Suffering from severe decorative withdrawal, one random Tuesday night, we decided to head to Selfridges. If selling unnecessary and overpriced crap to people was an art, Selfridges would be the grand master. This year the window displays were Wicked inspired. As we entered the building, cool-beat-takes on Christmas classics floated down to us from above. While focusing hard on trying to look like a rich person and not just like someone touring how the upper-echelons live in her 28 EUR charity shop coat, I almost missed the juicy-butted greek-esque statues donning Santa hats and the skate boarding pit with actual youth doing tricks. When we finally made it to the toy section on the fifth floor, we discovered that the music we heard earlier was played by an actual DJane having the time of her life. Can Christmas be cool? What I do know is that all I want for Christmas is to be able to add ‘Christmas DJ, Selfridges, 5th floor escalators’ to my LinkedIn.
Stop 4: The National Gallery
With one week to go until Christmas, I headed to the National Gallery for a final Christmas feeling attempt. As I queued for entry, I looked down Trafalgar Square with its Norwegian-donated Christmas tree towards Big Ben. The blaring notes of White Christmas wafting up from the market stalls mixed with the sound of impatient tourists asking the security guards passive-aggressively whether this was indeed the queue for ticket HOLDERS. Cheap decorations, trite music and general anxiety that there could be somewhere better to be – So is this what Christmas feels like as an adult?
Inside, I searched the nativity scenes painted over and over for the essence of the festive season. But all I could think about staring at the blues and reds was that Christmas used to inspire the greatest forms of artistic expression in oil and canvas, while today the highest art you can find this time of year are mozzarella and tomato slices assembled into a candy cane based on the latest Pinterest trends. At that point, I had to abandon my hunt for that Christmas feeling, lest I wanted to turn into a 21st century Grinch.
The day before I left London to spend the holidays with my family in Germany, I met up with a London friend who had moved to Australia and was visiting her family too. We hadn’t seen each other in 2 years. Sitting outside a random café, drinking filter coffee, the seasons became irrelevant. And in that moment, devoid of Christmas spices, synthetic snow and Wham beats, it dawned on me. Homecoming. That was the essence of my grown-up Christmas feeling. Because for all the frenzy of these days, I almost overlooked the holidays’ greatest gift: they are one of the few constants in a flaky world that allows us to reconnect with people we haven’t seen in a while without exchanging 335 WhatsApp messages and a Doodle poll first because you probably know where there’ll be this time of year. Frohe Weihnachten.