In Jean Shepherd’s hilarious “A Christmas Story,” the family turkey is devoured on Christmas afternoon by dogs, forcing a trip to Chinatown, where the family eats a duck.
Even if hounds don’t get your holiday bird, Christmas will be brought to you this year by China, the Communist country that has become Comrade Santa’s Workshop in the fantastically profitable business of Christmas stuff.
I mention this whenever I can to cluck and wag my finger at foolish Americans who have created such a huge Christmas market for the Chinese.
I like China. Its industrialists are embracing the 19th Century cheap labor values that led oppressed workers in America to eventually form unions. Now that we live in paradise, we don’t need unions anymore, of course, but the Chinese will, I am sure.
How quaint, workplace and political oppression in the same package.
A globalization two-fer.
The Chinese are manufacturing just about everything else we used to make in America, so why not Christmas stuff too?
My deeply pondered answer is, “Well, because!”
Some things you quite unreasonably just hang on to. Christmas stuff is supposed to come from snowy villages in Germany (OK, maybe Poland) or some industrial pit in New Jersey that pops out ornaments the way rabbits pop out baby bunnies.
My annual oriental Christmas thought rose, just like the exciting little bubbles in the ancient bubble candle Christmas lights of my youth, while I was window shopping in Wilmette. I dropped into a fancy store. I stood next to the Christmas ornaments display.
I am not allowed to buy any more Christmas ornaments.
We have an estimated “eleventy tons” of Christmas ornaments and a working old Lionel train set. Some of them have been handed down, some of them collected, like treasures, from all over the world, some of them picked up in junk shops.
I don’t need any more Christmas stuff.
Still, I looked.
The vast number of ornaments and sparkling things was from China, although there were a few little glass baubles from Poland.
Something from the Internet clicked in my head.
It was only a year ago that I hatched my idea to become the king of glow-in-the-dark nativity sets here in America. Someone in Hong Kong was selling them for $3 a set, but you had to buy 6,000 sets and you had to place the order in the summer.
I spread this idea around.
Everyone from patient priests to indulgent friends just looked at me.
No one would ever want a glow-in-the-dark nativity set, I was told.
I have given up on that plan, but I think they are wrong.
If no one wanted a glow-in-the-dark nativity set, the Chinese wouldn’t make them. And they were making them by the thousands and thousands last year.
This year, I decided to see what the Chinese had to say about their Christmas business, so I went to www.chinadaily.com to read the local press.
“World celebrates made-in-China Christmas,” was the headline on an old, but revealing, story.
Chinese customs reported that China exported $1.6 billion worth of Christmas products in 2003. More than half of that went to the United States, “including seven artificial trees erected in the White House.”
WHAT! George Bush had artificial trees from China in the White House?
I could see Bill Clinton, that philandering trailer-court hustler, with something like that.
He would lie about it if you asked.
He would say, “Why, no, that’s not an artificial tree. That was cut in Arkansas. It depends on how you define artificial. It depends on what is, is.”
And you would say, “Oh,” and move along and think nothing of it.
But George Bush? A Chinese-made tree?
Of course.
Just about anyone in the United States who has an artificial tree (and there are plenty of them for lots of reasons, allergies being just one) has a Chinese artificial tree. The Chinese say if you have an artificial tree, there is a 70 percent chance that it was manufactured in Shenzhen in Guangdong, China’s artificial tree capital.
William Cheng is the chairman of Shenzhen SG Handicraft Co. Ltd., which is one of 300 Chinese plastic Christmas tree exporters.
It’s a tough plastic-based business.
“There is so much competition out there. A lot of our customers want high-quality new products. To attract more foreign investors, we make more fiber-optic trees, trees with flashing stars, candles and so on …” said Cheng. He worries about cultural problems. Americans like white Christmas trees, but in China, white is the color of death. Yikes!
Maybe this bothers you.
So, make your own decorations.
I watched a Martha Stewart TV show once and she had a “wage slave” with a drill press putting holes through pecans so another wage slave could jam brass wire in there, make a hook and build a long pecan garland. She used gold spray paint to cover a sheaf of wheat for over the mantle. A woman stuck thousands of toothpicks in a Styrofoam oval, each of which would get its own cranberry!
On second thought, comrade, pass the glow-in-the-dark baby Jesus.
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E-mail: cmadigan@tribune.com
