Too much of a good thing

It is still Christmas in Doylestown.

It started in early November, when the Halloween hay-stacks, scarecrows and pumpkins were tidied away and the festive garlands, lights, and inflatables emerged. Trees twinkled, windows blazed. Whole houses were festooned with blinking lights and jerkily enthusiastic robotic elves. Spruce and holly were in abundance. Red berries clustered around candles, pine cones strewed fireplaces. Chandeliers were heavy with gold-leaf and ribbon. Red velvet and gold lamé proliferated on every sill, round every pillar, across every porch.

Doylestown was a winter wonderland, then.

Christmas isn’t so much a festival as an obsession and Americans throw themselves into it with hectic fervour.

It is a sort of a binge, much more so than in the UK. What you can’t buy on a Christmas theme isn’t worth having. Christmas food, of course. Christmas decorations, naturally. But also Christmas crockery, Christmas bed-linen, Christmas clothing. Christmas air-freshener, Christmas toilet paper, even Christmas toilet cleaner (Festive Forest Fragrance – I really saw it with my own eyes).

And here we are in March and frankly they haven’t quite got over it. It lingers, like a hangover, a tatty-tinsel reminder of surfeit. The garlands are drooping, the ‘ever-lasting’ lights glimmer still, but weakly. On most doors the wreath remains, but it is weather-beaten and mildewed. The Christmas cheer is little more than a dyspeptic groan.

As I walked through the residential streets yesterday there was evidence that people are trying to get a hold of themselves. One garden was a bolognese of lights taken from a storm-damaged tree. Dismantled displays waited to be carried down to the basement or taken back to U-Store, storage units rented year-round to house the bulky excess of Christmas paraphernalia.  The municipal authorities have just removed the snow-flake lights from the Main Street lamp-posts. But the Christmas tree is still there, in front of the Court House, lit up every night and each night it remains it diminishes an iota of the excitement it can engender on its reappearance next November.

They love an occasion in the US. Christmas is only one of a whole stream of them; New Year’s Day, Easter, Labour Day, Memorial Day, Veteran’s Day, Independence Day, Presidents’ Day, Columbus Day, Thanksgivings Day and the birthdays of Martin Luther King and George Washington all receive special recognition. (Twelve Night, clearly, is an exception.) No opportunity for a parade, a special meal, a flag-raising, a firework display, not to mention a sale, is ever passed up here.

You can’t knock it; a little of their pride and patriotism would go a long way back in Blighty. They like to celebrate their country and their traditions, and they’re wonderfully inclusive because, of course, their provenance is so diverse. St Patrick’s Day is coming up and there are plenty of Shamrocks and mischievous leprechauns to be seen. What we call Shrove Tuesday is Fastnacht here (or, less prosaically, Fat Tuesday) and doughnuts, not pancakes, are eaten. Even Christmas, (because of course, other winter festivals are available) has largely metamorphosed into The Holidays so as to incorporate Hanukah and the Festival of Lights.

They’re all ‘reasons to be cheerful’ and they pepper the American calendar, accounting for that up-beat, optimistic, ‘cup-half-full’ mentality which we dour British sometimes find a bit hard to stomach.

But it can get a little feverish, a tad too desperate, this manic lurch from one celebration to another, leaving no space between for the normality which would give shade and respite from the glitzy glare of gala, and which would, in fact, emphasise the Next Big Thing. Cup-half-full is in danger of becoming perpetual cups-brimming-over, a recipe for excess. You can have too much of a good thing.