A Christmas love story

Beautiful store decorations get dreaming of her own holiday windows

AT this time of year, I often peer into store windows for clues to what I should feel. Standing before a winter wonderland scene of wicker deer and frosted apples, assorted miniature wassailers in bobble hats and tartan, all set against snow-dusted spruce intertwined with fairy lights (and in the background the heroic figure of Santa, ho-ho-ho-ing a bit too strenuously in the face of untold strain), well, it can help you make believe that all is right with the world. Or right-ish.

Loiter a minute more and a familiar mixture of anxiety and longing will arise, heralding the realisation that you’re a festive athlete in preparation, and over the coming weeks every ounce of your strength and moral energy is going be summoned.

It could end with one of those sore throats that feel as if you have swallowed a pair of nail scissors. So, yes, you’d better watch out.

IDIOTIC BELIEFS

I don’t know where I stand in relation to Christmas anymore. I love it, and would do anything for it, but I can’t help feeling it wants my blood. Like a withholding father in a novel by Henry James, it may not be satisfied with my very best efforts.

It doesn’t help, of course, that I still nurse idiotic beliefs about the season, including the tenet that good presents transform lives, and unless you do a specific placement for the parcels in the six stockings you fill (creating meaningful contrasts and crescendos), you have not tried.

I greet Christmas as if I am a weary heroine in a country song, screwing my courage together as the old faded fellow strides into town, brandishing ruin and euphoria. I know children of 8 who grieve because Christmas does not make them feel as it did when they were 5. And here it comes again.

The Christmas windows this year to my mind look slightly lost. Perhaps I am not the only person who does not know how to meet the season. Slogans are everywhere, Christmas commandments written on glass.

MIDLIFE CRISIS

Walking down Oxford Street in London, heading west, there are (in no particular order): #Play for Peace; Beat Winter; Moz the Monster Eats All the Mince Pies; Bring Back Merry; You Shall Find the Dress to Turn Heads; Be the Light; Give Love; Apples and Pears and Sprouts or Nowt; Simplicity and Perfection; Let’s Make Merry and Follow the Parade.

Harrods has a startling new approach: vitrine biography! Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, this is your life. Miniature, moving 3D figures of the Italian designers, dimly recalling Statler and Waldorf from