Park Avenue's Colourful Christmas - 24 December 1999

A curious thing about a city which boasts so extravagantly about its best features - and even some of its worst - is it has a never-mentioned little miracle: the railed-off plots of grass that for almost three miles run down the middle of Park Avenue and divide the uptown and downtown traffic.

Along the whole stretch - 54 blocks, from 96th to 42nd Street - what is a constant delight and surprise is the regularly changing character of these more than 50 little gardens - and not so little - each one city block long and about 15 feet wide.

You drive down the Avenue one season of the year through a great ripple of crocuses. Next time tulips from here to infinity. Sometimes you notice that at each end of each garden there is a new young tree - a hundred or so of them from the 96th Street entrance down to where the Avenue ends at Grand Central Station.

Or maybe next time they're locusts, or London plane trees. At Christmas time, as now, they've been replaced by small firs.

I suppose we take it so easily for granted, and thousands of the true city types never notice the changes at all because the very large workforce that performs these magical transformations works by night and by stealth.

In 50 years of living round the corner from the long divide of Park Avenue I have never seen any of them at their remarkable labour of creating, along three miles, complete variations of miniature landscapes about, it seems, once every few weeks.

I know they're at it because I once tactfully guessed at the fortune it requires to employ them and maintain this city perquisite.

I happen to know the possessor of the fortune, a lady named Mary Lasker, heiress of an advertising multimillionaire, a self-effacing, absolutely non-socialite doer of many unadvertised good works, of which the Park Avenue divider is the only conspicuous one.

At Christmas time especially it makes me think again with gratitude of the late Mary Lasker for now each tree is lit at twilight and by Mrs Lasker's request and, thank God, the confirming dictate of the Park Avenue property owners, the trees are not gaily decorated with red bulbs and green bulbs and purple bulbs and yellow bulbs - illuminations that make so many city squares and streets look like amusement arcades gone berserk.

Each of the Park Avenue firs is decorated with about 500-600 tiny oyster white bulbs. So at twilight you look down from the small eminence of 96th Street along the three-mile stretch of small fountains of light. All the way down the only colours are the alternating reds and greens of the traffic lights at 50-odd corners.

Now by day it used to be that the long canyon of Park Avenue was majestically closed at the southern end by the great gold dome of Grand Central Station, and then they built behind it a towering flat monolith of a skyscraper which blotted out the dome or indeed the outline of Grand Central.

This defiling obstacle has been ingeniously made to evaporate by night at Christmas time. As the dark comes on and both Grand Central and the monolith behind it fade into the black sky there appears by magic a great white cross.

This is achieved by leaving on the lights of so many offices on one floor to form the horizontal bar and many more offices to form the vertical bar. Simple and sublime.

But in the past year or two I'm afraid it's been an object of sporadic controversy.

Controversy? From whom? From that fervent band of First Amendment protesters who sometimes sound as if there were no other clause in the Bill of Rights: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" - which has been taken, in many court appeals in many states to forbid every expression of any religion by word, decoration, symbol, on public property.

This argument has been going on for years and years and is effectively won mainly in places where agnostics or atheists speak louder and longer than the true believers in any religion popular in a given town.

So far, by the way, there have been no protests against the dozen performances of the Messiah and half dozen of Bach's Christmas Oratorio even done in public auditoriums or theatres. The board of Aclu - the American Civil Liberties Union - appears to be slipping.

There are some states, however, that can afford to be more blasé or unintimidated by the First Amendment fanatics for an interesting new reason.

What is it that Florida, Texas, California have in common that favourably affects the practice of the Christian religion and, say, tends to discourage the march of an army of atheists with banners?

The answer? They are the states - south western states - into which more South and Central American immigrants have arrived in the past quarter century than in the rest of the country put together - a great population of what we now call Latinos or Hispanics, the vast majority of them practising Roman Catholics.

What they have brought to Christmas is the colourful and quite different tradition of Christmas decoration.

Whereas most of the United States picked up the English 19th century trimmings - Prince Albert's Christmas tree, holly and ivy, green and red so forth - while Britain, by the way, picked up from New York via the Dutch settlers, the idea of the well known figure of Santa Claus.

The Mexicans, especially, have given us the most colourful and original variations: this week the Governor of Texas, one George W Bush, gave a little television tour of the governor's mansion and showed off a marvellous array of Christmas trees and cactuses hung with orange and pink flowers.

And, home-made creches that looked as if they'd been imported from that first Christian Coptic chapel outside Cairo which has those primitive comic strip figures of Adam and Eve and a jolly snake.

But here in Austin, Texas, were all the nativity figures - the wise men, Joseph and Mary, the shepherds - as marvellous little painted wooden figures which we, the civilised Anglo-European types who couldn't draw a broomstick, call primitives.

Governor Bush, you may have heard is running for president and running very hard - the election is only nine months away. And he showed off the delightful Mexican decorations with understandable effusiveness, stopping from time to time to talk in Spanish to a passing child.

The public, of course, could visit the governor's mansion just as the public makes daily tours of the White House.

Incidentally I ought to throw in that anyone running for public office - a state office anyway - in Florida, Texas, Nevada, Southern California, nowadays had better talk Spanish as well as English if he/she holds any hope of being elected.

But whatever variations different immigrant groups may bring in there's one symbol - one expression of Christmas - that dependably returns every year throughout the country to appear in theatrical form in city theatres, centres, on television in half a dozen versions and is, at the moment, dazzling nightly audiences in New York City's vast Radio City Music Hall.

It is Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. And the booksellers, including the titans online, indicate that every year the sales of A Christmas Carol go smartly up.

Poor Dickens. He lost £200 on the book, sued an outrageous couple that pirated his work and sold it cheap. He was awarded £1,500 damages, so the couple promptly declared bankruptcy and Dickens got nothing but had to pay out £700 for his own court fees.

I suppose that we, for most of this century, have thought of the carol as the most vivid representation of an old English tradition of Christmas - the feasting and the caroling and the Christmas cards and the parties, with their particular customs - the tree, the pudding, the kissings and dancings and general merriment.

Nothing could be more untrue.

For centuries Christmas was an annual street brawl with a reputation for debauchery and general rowdiness. The Church of England and the puritans here prohibited it as a religious ceremony - or a celebration of Christ's birth - until well into the 18th century.

When Dickens published the Carol in 1843 nobody had ever seen a Christmas card or a Christmas tree - except at Windsor.

The street brawl was still a fact and deplored by respectable people who, by then, had got to the point of taking a half day off on Christmas Day and holding a special mid-afternoon dinner.

The turkey had long established himself after his long journey from America. The great thing was fowl - I mean game - and pastries and many, many jellies and Christmas punch.

When the Carol appeared what delighted everybody was the entertaining, suspenseful plot.

But William Makepeace Thackeray said it defied literary criticism, it was a work whose central idea was that Christmas was the paradox of a merry time that entailed duties and obligations especially to the poor and added the astonishing new notion that Christmas was a special time of the year for redemption - for everybody to take stock and begin to lead a better life.

I think it's impossible today to appreciate the shock of this idea, disguised as brilliant entertainment. It's at the root of the custom of New Year's resolutions.

But the wish to make amends for the flaws in one's character is something that some people - a few - become conscious of as they grow old.

One was the late, the recently late, actor George C. Scott. Not too long before he died he gave an engaging, vibrant, television interview. He was an engaging, vibrant man.

There was much talk about his towering portrayal of General George Patton.

When he was asked what was his favourite role of all he did not hesitate: George C. Scott was, in private life, a violent man. It was a surprising and happy thing to hear him say that his favourite role of all was Ebenezer Scrooge.

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