Indoor Christmas trees are breath of fresh air
The hardest working Christmas tree in Toronto is in Cumberland Terrace at Yonge and Bloor Sts. It stands resolute in a back hallway of this near-forgotten 1970s mall, tucked in behind the shiny Bloor shops, a place slated for demolition and redevelopment.
Each year somebody pulls out the stubby artificial tree from storage and sets it up with care on the discoera brown tiles, decorating it with white and gold ornaments. As holiday trees go, it’s understated, without a star or angel, just an electric cord running out of the top. There’s a certain nobility to it among surroundings that are no longer in style (though for those of us who hold a candle for these sorts of accidentally retro places, the tree is an added bonus).
I like to think it’s a memorial tree for the Potters Field that used to be here, Yorkville’s non-sectarian cemetery for the poor.
Though closed in 1855 after which the 6,685 bodies were moved to the Toronto Necropolis and Mount Pleasant cemetery, this was their first resting spot and these unnamed, dispossessed early Torontonians deserve a nice tree of their own.
All over the city trees like this, sometimes humble, sometimes spectacularly grand, decorate the most everyday, ordinary, unremarkable and usually ignored places. All are gestures of joy and light, secular or sacred, depending on who’s doing the viewing. Building lobbies, corridors and concourses get the treatment too; the Scrooges won’t notice but the holiday decorations are the one time a year often anonymous architectural spaces get a lot of attention.
The building lobbies of office towers have the most elaborate decoration schemes, the handiwork of interior design teams who do this kind of thing for a living. More interesting perhaps are the ones that are obviously done by non-professionals, those found in apartment building lobbies and businesses without big decor budgets. The ornaments may not have the sentimental value found on domestic trees, but these still have a quirky human touch the big corporate decorations don’t.
Though not (yet) a Christmas classic in the counterintuitive way Die Hard is, Stanley Kubrick’s final masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut is, among many other things, a magnificent exercise in holiday art direction.
Christmas lights are present in nearly every space Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman inhabit and despite the growing menace in the film, the happy lights infiltrate so many places: cafés, ballrooms, shops and along sidewalks.
Released in 1999, it’s one of the last great incandescent spectacles, as the lights have the rich, mellow glow that today’s efficient LEDs are still trying to match.
Northern places try very hard to light their cities during these weeks of long darkness. London, Paris, Cardiff, Berlin and Hamburg — northern European places I’ve had the fortune of visiting in December — string lights in the most inventive ways across their streets and on their buildings, defiant acts in the face of mid-to-late afternoon dusk. At a lower latitude, the darkness is not as conspicuous in Toronto, so we decorate with less fervour.
Still, Toronto is lit up well right now, but we’ll be plunged into darkness come the new year. The transition is a bit jarring and, frankly, depressing. Maybe that guy down your street who keeps his Christmas lights up until June has the right idea. Defiant, if a bit lazy.
In the Toronto Coach Terminal on Bay St. there’s another hard-working tree bringing joy to a place where joy is sometimes hard to come by. Under No Smoking and Do Not Feed Pigeons or Other Birds signs, this ragged little tree stands behind crowd-control barriers, protecting it from the holiday bustle. Determined, its soft-coloured lights battle the harsh fluorescent ones above.
Like this little bus station tree, try to hold onto the light as long as you can. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef