My dear commoners,
One writes today on the subject of Christmas, that annual season of lights, goodwill, mulled beverages, and municipal farce. Crediton Town Council, in its infinite wisdom, appears to have decided that the true spirit of the festive season lies not in preparation, communication, or competence, but in keeping the public in a state of baffled suspense until the very last possible moment.
And so we arrive at this year’s seasonal masterpiece: the quiet disappearance of the traditional high street Christmas trees, which the council had apparently known since April were not returning, but which residents were informed about only a few days before the switch-on. A triumph of timing, if your ambition is to combine festive cheer with the atmosphere of a badly managed ambush.
One is almost forced to admire the brass neck of it.
Most people, when they think of Christmas magic, think of carols, fairy lights, perhaps a modest sherry, and the annual swallowing of one’s disappointment at novelty socks. The council, however, has a more original vision. For them, Christmas enchantment appears to consist of concealing obvious changes for months on end, then revealing them at the last minute and acting as though this were all part of the twinkling seasonal experience.
“Suspense,” no doubt.
Yes, quite. Nothing says Yuletide delight like discovering three days beforehand that a familiar feature of the high street has been quietly bumped off sometime in spring, and no one thought to mention it.
The little bracket-mounted trees above the shops, we are told, had reached “end of life,” which is a wonderfully elegant phrase, usually reserved for elderly Labradors and underperforming photocopiers. Their brackets, too, were apparently found wanting, after a flag fell from one and nearly struck a peasant — a development which, in fairness, sounds like the single most energetic thing the whole system has managed in months.
This, naturally, revealed a structural issue.
And what was done with this revelation?
Why, almost nothing at all for ages, of course.
One can picture the scene perfectly. A potential safety concern is identified. Eyebrows are raised. Notes are made. Someone says, “We must look into that.” Then everybody toddles off for the summer while the issue is left sitting on the shelf like an unwanted tin of biscuits. Only in September, when even the dimmest soul in local government might begin to remember that Christmas does tend to turn up in December with remarkable consistency, did matters apparently begin to stir.
And even then, the public was not told until three days before the switch-on.
Three days.
This, one assumes, was considered the perfect balance between transparency and avoiding the beastly inconvenience of residents having opinions. Had people been told earlier, they might have asked questions, expressed annoyance, or committed the unspeakable vulgarity of expecting some sort of explanation. Much tidier, then, to hold the information back until there was scarcely time for anyone to do anything but blink at the festive void and carry on.
There is something wonderfully council-like about this. Not merely failing to communicate, but failing to communicate in such a way that the failure itself is presented as sensible. One imagines the little speeches already:
We didn’t want to alarm anyone.
We were still assessing the position.
We wished to avoid confusion.
We felt it best to update people once matters were clearer.
And by “clearer,” of course, they mean “too late for fisticuffs.”
An apology was later issued saying that communication “could have been better,” which is the sort of phrase officials produce when they know perfectly well they have made a frightful hash of something but cannot quite bring themselves to say so without fainting. Could have been better? Yes. So could the Charge of the Light Brigade, but one does not usually issue that as a press statement.
Still, residents were reassured that the lack of trees should not dampen the festive spirit, because the town still possessed lights, shops, and — most movingly of all — the vague memory of what the high street used to look like when the decorations were properly done.
Marvellous. One can only imagine next year’s slogan now:
Christmas in Crediton — enjoy what remains.
And when questions were raised about whether any of this might, in some tiny way, chip at public trust, the answer reportedly given was that Christmas was still happening on the 25th of December. Which is quite something. By that standard, one could set fire to the pudding, misplace the turkey, spill some bubbly on the chaise lounge, and still declare the feast a roaring success because time, stubbornly enough, continues to pass.
It is the kind of reasoning one usually encounters in men who have reversed a motor carriage into a duck pond but wish to stress that the journey has, technically speaking, been successful, as they parked the damn thing.
At Houndstone Hall, this sort of piffle would not survive until elevenses. If the household had known since April that the traditional decorations were finished, unsafe, or fit only for the grave, the matter would have been addressed promptly, replacements considered, and the household informed before Advent rather than after half the pudding was steamed. Perkins, my Labrador — though admittedly stronger on pheasants than festive planning — understands the essential principle rather better than the town council: if Christmas is going to look different, one informs the commoners before they are standing in the street peering upwards like disappointed Victorian orphans.
So let us be honest about what happened here. This was not mystery. It was not magic. It was not suspense. It was the usual dreary little civic muddle in which people know a thing, fail to say a thing, wait far too long, and then act surprised that the public notices the thing. The peasants, despite their alarming knitwear and occasional tendency to treat the high street as a parking experiment, are perfectly capable of handling bad news. What they dislike — quite rightly — is being treated like mushrooms: kept in the dark and expected to be festive about it.
Still, one must be fair. Crediton did indeed receive a surprise Christmas. The surprise was simply that the council had known since April and still managed to leave half the town looking up at bare shopfronts in December, wondering where the blasted trees had gone.
Spiffing.