Advent in Berlin
I don’t need an Advent calendar to tell me that Christmas is hurtling towards us like a train without brakes. No, I don’t need to open the doors of a calendar with plump little cherubs, all I have to do is read Bild Zeitung. Precisely three weeks before Christmas – same procedure as every year – it carries an article with the headline: Krebsgifte in Kinderspielzeug; wie schlimm ist es wirklich? All Bild wants to do, of course, of course, is protect our children (tip: “Sie sollen keine Speilwaren kaufen, die stark nach Chemie riechen”). Or is it perhaps a subtle attempt to persuade Oma to buy (boring but non-toxic) German-made wooden toys rather than Chinese plastic junk? Whatever the reason, Bild’s annual toy-horror-show is a fixed part of Germany’s hidden advent calendar. Other dates to note: November 23-30, the pre-Advent week, when 32 per cent of German women buy their Christmas presents. No wonder advertising budgets of newspapers improve radically from November 5. Optimal time for a reporter to ask for a wage rise from his Chefredakteur: December 5, after the November advertising figures have arrived, raising his spirits.
Now I am not claiming that Germans turn into robots, consumer-automatons, at Christmas. But there are, shall we say, distinct buying habits that can be tracked just as ornithologists follow the migration patterns of birds or the hibernation behaviour of grizzly bears. Twenty per cent of German men – OK, I don’t have an actual survey, but ask the shop assistants in KaDeWe – buy presents for their partners on December 23. And on average they take 12 minutes to make the decision. How many couples – ten per cent? – promise not to buy each other presents this Christmas (“schließlich sind wir Erwachsene”)? And how many women end up breaking their word and buying something, which then embarrasses their empty-handed partners who are then grumpy for the rest of the Feiertage? The advent calendar should in any case be extended to December 27: the day when Berliners rush to Tauentzien to exchange their unwanted presents. Open the doors to that calendar window and you would probably see a picture of a frustrated shop cashier tearing out her hair.
So much for the seasonal rituals. But this year, pre-Christmas strategy seems to be a little different. People are busily mobilising their financial resources in order to keep their Christmas at roughly the same level as every year. The reality is that most Germans feel that they are worse off than in, say, 2006; Christmas is the moment when you realise it. As a result many people are cashing in their reserves in order to spend on presents. The Schmuck-Ankaufstellen are springing up everywhere; I keep expecting my local Kebab shop (which already sells Lotto tickets, Currywurst, coffee and the FAZ) to set up a stand buying and selling gold. The prices of the Edel-metals are going through the roof and jewellers will tell you that more and more women in Berlin are selling their bracelets.
But there are other treasures too. On the notice-board in Reichelt on the Knesebeckstraße someone is selling his complete Roy Black disc collection. How he must have loved Roy Black! And how sad that they have to be sold in this way, at this time. At my own supermarket, now called Kaiser’s again after undergoing more name-changes that St Petersburg, the notice-board has become a snapshot of a hard Christmas. Somebody offers a biography of Willy Brandt (gebunden, sehr gut erhalten) for 8 euros instead of 25 euros (the seller, surely not Egon Bahr who lives around the corner?), a Herren Lammfellmantel size 52 is going for 100 euros, lots of people are trying to sell their Ferienwohnung (Bad Harzburg, 57 square metres, 58,000 euros) and the prices have been coming down over since the autumn, an Elektroauto mit Fernbedienung for 15 euros, an original verpacktes Autoradio CD for 50 euros. There are Barbies, Playmobil, Astrid Lindgren, Cornelia Funke: it’s as if the whole community is on a leaking lifeboat and needs to shed weight quickly, as if everything has to be converted into cash before December 24.
Is this not what the Merkel government wants? Spend, spend, spend – boost domestic demand and keep up growth in the coming months? Well, yes. Except that a lot of this money is being spent on goods made in China. The German consumer Christmas is Chinese; 75 per cent of the toys being sold are made there. One factory outside Shanghai produces 10,000 Christmas items for Germany. Plastic snowmen with plastic carrots for noses; Santa hats with bells on; tin angles with harps. The only German item in the German living room in this Christmas is likely to the natural Christmas tree. If you get a practical plastic one with flashing lights that will, of course, be Made in China. So the attempt to increase German growth by encouraging Christmas Kaufstimmung will largely benefit the country that is Germany’s leading rival in the world export tables.
As for that genuine German tree – you shouldn’t really have it. Sie wissen schon: Klimaschutz. There are some Christmases when you just cannot win. Christmas 2009 is one of them.
