Illuminations, Class Identities and the
Contested Landscapes of Christmas
II Tim Edensor
Manchester Metropolitan University
II Steve Millington
Manchester Metropolitan University
ABSTRACT
In the last two decades, illuminating the outside of a house with multi-coloured
lights has become a popular British Christmas practice, typically adopted within
working-class neighbourhoods and thus producing a particular geography of illumination.This
article explores how such displays have become a site for class conflict
mobilized around contesting ideas about space, time, community, aesthetics
and festivity, highlighting how the symbolic economy of class conflict moves across
popular culture. We focus upon two contrasting class-making practices evoking
conflicting cultural values. First, we examine the themes prevalent in negative
media representations of Christmas lights, notably the expression of disgust which
foregrounds the working-class stereotype, the ‘chav’. Second, we analyse the motivations
of displayers, exploring how the illuminations are imbued with idealistic
notions about conviviality and generosity.
KEY WORDS
chav / Christmas / class / conviviality / disgust / distinction / generosity / idealism /
illumination / taste
Introduction
T
he globalization of Christmas as a dynamic, ‘syncretic modern form’
(Miller, 1995: 4) allows for enormous local variations. In the last two
decades, illuminating the outside of a house with multi-coloured lights has
103
Sociology
Copyright © 2009
BSA Publications Ltd®
Volume 43(1): 103–121
DOI: 10.1177/0038038508099100
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become a popular British Christmas practice. Whereas in the US these illuminations
typically cover large middle-class dwellings, in Britain they have been
largely adopted within working-class neighbourhoods, producing a particular
geography of Christmas illumination. While modest, chic white and blue lighting
illuminates middle-class housing areas, more colourful extravaganzas pervade
working-class residential districts. Such displays contain various elements:
festive inscriptions or traditional Christmas iconography, including holly,
Christmas trees, Father Christmas, stars, sleighs, snowmen, bells and parcels;
depictions of toy trains, ladders, helicopters, aeroplanes, hot air balloons and
teddy bears; large inflatables; and flashing lights and pulsing rope lines. Usually
installed from late November or early December, displays remain installed until
mid January and have transformed the British urban nightscape, causing much
controversy, reflected in the derogatory term, ‘chav bling’.
In this article we investigate how and why such displays have become a
focus for two contrasting forms of class expression. First we identify the prevalent
negative tropes in mediated discourses, most prominently on internet chat
forums, which implicitly construct displayers as lowly working-class ‘others’,
typically encapsulated in the figure of the ‘chav’. Second, we utilize empirical
research to explore the motivations of 22 displayers in Manchester and
Sheffield over Christmas 2006, and the ways in which they conceive their practices
as productive of ‘community’. We investigate how these divergent productions
proffer contesting ideas about space, community, aesthetics and festivity
and highlight how they are mobilized through different realms that rarely intersect,
namely through media networks and local, social networks. Accordingly,
we argue that while both these practices express different contemporary processes
of class formation, they operate within distinct circuits that provoke
questions about social connectedness and the power to mobilize identity within
different spatial contexts.
We align ourselves with recent accounts that place class back onto the sociological
agenda after a period in which there has been ‘a strange death of class
in media and political representation’ (Milner, 1999: 1), along with a parallel
dearth in mainstream academic discourse. Where scholarly discussion about
class has occurred, it has been bedevilled by abstract, widely varying definitions
(see Savage, 2000). Yet, while Bromley argues that class has become a ‘ghost in
the machine of contemporary British politics, the great “unspoken”’ (2000: 51),
he suggests that it remains alive in British cinema. Skeggs likewise refers to the
‘massive proliferation of popular cultural output devoted to the expression of
class interests’ (2004: 5). Indeed, the symbolic economy of class expression and
conflict continues to pervade popular culture, a realm within which selves and
others are represented in ‘a system of inscription, exchange, perspective and
value-laden attribution’ (p. 9). Accordingly, in the first part of our analysis, we
investigate how negative depictions of Christmas light displayers circulate
through websites and newspaper discussions, producing an imaginary rough
working-class subject or ‘chav’ and also an implicitly classed self to this lowly
‘other’. However, we also contend that class formation and expression remains
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a grounded process, performed and embedded in local space, and thus we analyse
the cultural contexts and class understandings which inform the initiation
and maintenance of festive illumination, consequently avoiding the tendency to
present those impugned in media representations as passive victims.
Disgusted Responses to Illumination
The Christmas light displays across Britain have excited much media comment.
While many welcome their addition onto the festive landscape, we focus on the
significant percentage of exceedingly negative1
media responses found in websites
and national and local newspapers, and feature an exemplary selection
from this commentary to draw out the dominant discursive tropes through
which the displays and their creators are characterized and criticized. The websites,
found through engine searches featuring terms related to Christmas illumination,
were of two types: comments from viewers and readers to news
features about light displays in national and local media; and the website chavs-
cum,2
which annually featured a selection of photographs of displays sent in by
respondents along with their critical commentary. Immediately noticeable is a
class-oriented discourse that stereotypes displayers as ‘chavs’.
Tyler (2008) argues that in media-saturated cultures in which social classifications
are extensively imagined and represented, the figure of the ‘chav’ has
become over-determined in disproportionate and emotive ways that reveal
underlying anxieties within middle-class and ‘respectable’ working-class fractions.
An iterative mediated process produces powerful social and cultural
effects through which the ‘chav’ becomes ‘real’, for repetitive negative representations
are subsequently mobilized and assigned to actual bodies and spaces
outside media space. Tyler underlines how, on particular websites, the articulation
of terminologies and attitudes are progressively intensified, generating and
consolidating this ‘reality’. These assumptions become further entrenched
through their association with popular British media forms and an intensified
celebrity culture, including comedy characters Vicki Pollard from Little Britain
and Wayne and Waynetta Slob from the Harry Enfield Show, pop stars Lady
Sovereign and Mike Skinner, and uber-chavs Wayne Rooney and Jade Goody.
As Lawler (2005), Skeggs (2005) and Tyler (2008) have emphasized, depictions
of the ‘chav’ are suffused with a sense of disgust. Tyler shows how emotions
generated by these expressions of disgust reinforce an ‘other’-oriented
form of middle-class identity, which relies on shared affect. Skeggs underlines
how the articulation of disgust emerges out of ‘a crisis in middle-class authority
and security’ (2005: 968) and attempts to reinforce forms of distinction that
authorize particular values and subjectivities, as the following website contribution
makes explicit:
I am so glad I have money and am not forced to live in local authority housing. This
image just makes me realise how lucky I am to be an educated, cultured member of
the middle classes. (From website www.chavscum.co.uk)3
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As Lawler contends, forms of middle-class disgust emerge out of relational
assumptions. However, the terms ‘chav’ or ‘charver’ are also mobilized as part
of a reconfigured articulation of the enduring distinction between ‘respectable’
and ‘rough’ working classes. In his rich discussion of working-class masculinity
in north-east England, Nayak (2006) highlights how groups of young workingclass
men are distinguished by their cultural tastes, self-presentation and participation
in new corporate leisure spaces. Typically, these more ‘respectable’
youths distinguish themselves from ‘chavs’, whom they characterize as predisposed
towards violence, criminality, indolence and welfare dependency, and by
their rough speech and bodily comportment. Accordingly, these assignations
render class visible ‘through a mobile economy of signs, discursively mapped
onto the cartography of the post-industrial city and the working and non-working
bodies that lie therein’ (Nayak, 2006: 827). In the largely anonymous
extracts from websites that we select, the class of contributors is unidentifiable.
Nevertheless, there are distinctions of tone between those who use derogatory,
condemnatory and abusive speech and others who adopt a more distanced,
refined moral tone that perhaps hint at class identities.
In these extracts, there are prevalent assumptions that beauty is transcendent
and self-evident, and ‘good taste’ can only be identified by those with the
capacity to discern it, whereas those unable to accord with such judgements are
aesthetically and morally deficient. Visceral responses of disgust which
(over)react against the violation of taste underscore the boundaries between ‘us’
and ‘them’ and produce abject bodies with their excess flesh, bad odour, vile
habits, hideous clothing, sexual depravities and gluttonous tendencies. In addition,
assumptions about social backwardness are apt to extend into assertions
that the lowly working class are ‘excessively white – offensively and embarrassingly
white’ (Haylett, 2001: 355) and further, unlike the ‘cosmopolitan’
middle class, are ‘emblematically racist’ (p. 356) and parochial.
To bring out the class-making specificities of these negative discursive portrayals
of Christmas light displayers, we highlight the implicit articulation of
distinctive expressions of identity that mobilize geographical and consumeroriented
values.
The Imagined Geographies of the ‘Chav’
Popular media expressions of disgust produce a luridly imagined space populated
by chavs and other bete-noires, including youths serving anti-social
behaviour orders (ASBOs), gangs, drug users, hoodie clad ne’er-do-wells,
teenage single mothers, asylum seekers, those dependent on welfare, and the
work-shy. This imagined geography is apparent in one reader’s response to a
feature4
on a particular local Christmas lights display:
Sooo Chav-like. Funniest thing is that the majority of these houses with big light displays
outside are on council estates where the majority are on benefits. A sense of
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wasting money (my taxes no doubt) and wasting electric (not very environmentally
friendly). People need a reality check and instead of wasting my money maybe find
a job and some taste. (Manchester Evening News website)
This imaginary is further exemplified by the following website contribution
where ‘negative place images of social housing estates have congealed around
immovable stigmatised reputations’ (Watt, 2006: 780), and can be translated
into local contexts:
This little council house beauty can be found in its natural habitat of Cardiff‘s
North Way. Astonishingly it makes up 25% of Cardiff‘s electrical consumption and
is sponsored very graciously by the benefits agency. (chavscum website)
These ‘sink’ council estates are supplemented by ‘bog-standard’ secondary
schools, brothels, betting shops, pubs and mean streets, imagined geographies
that chime with earlier and contemporaneous spatial depictions of spaces
inhabited by the ‘non-respectable’ working class (Haylett, 2001).
Representations of particular low class locations include ‘crap towns’ (Jordison
and Kieran, 2006) such as Croydon, Hull and Luton, a link between place and
disgust apparent below:
I nearly crashed the car when I saw this blinged up scummy chav house on an estate
near me in Middlesbrough – known locally as ‘middes-b-ROUGH’. I bet they are
spending all of their benefit on leccy tokens! scum! Best bit is it’s probably all
nicked. (chavscum website)
Such critiques are infused by assumptions that other, ‘proper’ space-making
practices produce a respectable landscape. Frequently, such assertions infer that
unrespectable practices unfairly impose bad taste upon neighbours and should
be confined to the private realm inside the house:
Tacky? They are environmental vandalism on the grossest scale. If people want garish
decorations, put them where others don‘t have to see them. (BBC News website)
I love Christmas and enjoy setting up the tree and decorations with my family but
find decorations of this type tacky and offensive. It is perfectly acceptable to decorate
the interior of your house to whatever level you choose but to go to these
extremes on the exterior has nothing to do with celebrating Christmas but is simply
a case of one upmanship with the tacky neighbours. (BBC News website)
Moreover, concerns about spatial propriety are informed by anxieties that such
practices are potentially contagious, might infiltrate their own neighbourhoods,
breaching spatial boundaries. They are also inflected by the contemporary
espousal that the middle class are now marginalized subjects (McCarthy
et al., 1997):
Stanhope is a nice picturesque village in Weardale, Co. Durham. Nowhere is safe
from being ruined by the filthy charver scum however. The picture doesn’t do it
justice as the reindeers & santas are all animated. Please God burn it down.
(chavscum website)
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The potential for grotesque, unruly and excessive forms of house and
garden decoration to infringe upon the aesthetic convention of ‘respectable’
space are further matched by temporal norms. Notions about how nocturnal
urban space should be appropriately regulated and about the correct time span
during which exterior lighting should be displayed are expressed.
Commentators aver that Christmas is expanding beyond its proper limits and
festive light displays, the complaints go, are erected too soon and last too long:
Is November the first not a little early? I reckon that planning permission should be
sought for this type of decoration and the display period should be much shorter.
They can be an eyesore to neighbours and how many will really say what they
think?... but First November? (Manchester Evening News website)
The summoning up of lurid working-class places of otherness in these critiques
implicitly construct an ‘other’ to those who are making the commentary. This
is thus a class-making practice that constructs a ‘respectable’, orderly and tasteful
geography in contrast to these vilified landscapes.
Design and Consumer Identities
Moran (2006) asserts that the ‘chav’ phenomenon surfaced as part of the 1980s
turn towards neo-liberal thinking and ‘enterprise culture’. A form of consumer
profiling emerged in the advertising and marketing industries, ‘lifestyle
research’, that was pervaded with assumptions about the declining importance
of class. Instead, society was conceived of as comprising discrete groups distinguished
by their tastes and lifestyle choices, rather than level of income or occupation.
Such typologies seeped into media commentary to influence popular
discourses and everyday chat, in which ‘yuppies’, ‘toffs’, ‘boffins’ and ‘chavs’
loom large. Yet these stereotypical characters re-introduce class, re-orienting it
around lifestyle, the performance of self and consumption. Thus, lower class
groups are typified by their crass, excessive and showy consumption, evident in
clothing styles, ornaments and musical tastes. Accordingly, negative responses
to Christmas displays exemplify the belief that ‘chav culture is a symptom of a
more general debasement of taste’ (Moran, 2006: 269), as the following distinction-oriented
statements assert:
Christmas decorations have been becoming tackier year on year. It doesn’t stop at
lights any more. Now we are subjected to inflatable Homer Simpson Santas and
other totally inane rubbish. (BBC News website)
Someone should pull the plug on ‘Christmas Houses’ – tasteless, tacky and an
embarrassment to the neighbours... Life must be so dull for these people spending 3
weeks attaching tat to your house. Could be worse I guess, at least they aren’t at the
end of my street. (Manchester Evening News website)
This denigration of style and taste is embedded in the increasing centrality
of lifestyle to certain middle-class and would-be middle-class groups, where
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consumption-oriented self-making is accompanied by impulses to mark out
others as deficient consumers, as is made explicit in the assumed cosmopolitan
attitude of the following extract:
Yes! Jump on a plane with a budget airline and fly to Germany to see a Christmas
market. Tasteful, hand-crafted decorations on display and for sale. Outdoor decorations
need not be tasteless. Why do so many Brits go over the top? (BBC News
website)
Such assertions maintain the authoritative discrimination through which particular
class fractions feel able to identify ‘inappropriate’ excess and vulgarity.
This authority is further informed by an increasingly influential group of cultural
intermediaries and lifestyle media experts (Bell and Hollows, 2005) who
critically comment on lifestyles, provide tasteful ‘makeovers’ of homes, bodies,
clothing and gardens, judge competencies in home-making, cooking and design
and offer remedial cures for deficiencies, all the time reinforcing particular cultural
values that masquerade as ‘common-sense’.
Taylor maintains that the transformations wrought by these gurus of
design impose particular middle-class ‘solutions’ on the homes and gardens of
those who are alleged to possess ‘less developed’ tastes (2005: 113). Such
redesign is frequently themed so as to provide an aesthetically coherent, overarching
concept into which everything must fit and from which ‘excessive’ fixtures,
colours and ornaments must be banished (Holliday, 2005). Accordingly,
expressive working-class decorative practices clash with typically ‘understated’
middle-class designs, which epitomise good taste by ‘not being too brash or
obvious about material wealth’ (Bridge, 2007: 40). Light displays are thus
regarded as ‘excessive’ (Skeggs, 2005: 974), disrupting carefully themed, understated
markings of distinction. The articulation of such judgements via media
reveals how class relations are apt to ‘seep into the very public production and
performance of supposedly private subjective construction’ (pp. 974–5).
This identification of excess in Christmas décor chimes with the excessive
bodies of lowly working-class people who eat too much, or in women
depicted as excessively vulgar or sexual, wearing inappropriate clothing. The
purchasing of certain clothing styles or jewellery (‘bling’) or the hiring of
limousines for nights out is identified as an excessive squandering of money.
Even expressions of mourning through the erection and maintenance of roadside
shrines can be typified as excessively emotional (Potts, forthcoming).
These identifications often extend into demanding legislative regulation of
‘excessive’ noise, design and celebrations, even during the Christmas festive
season long associated with excessive consumption, expenditure and
behaviour. For even Christmas can be championed as an occasion for the
sophisticated display of ‘tasteful’ décor.
Accordingly, Christmas light displays are commonly regarded as an
immodest spectacle, excessive aesthetically, a waste of money by poor, inept
consumers, and above all, a waste of electricity, an outrage against energy
conservation and ecological thinking:
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Have these people no concern for the environment. What a waste of resources. They
aren’t exactly thinking of the long term future for the kids are they? (Manchester
Evening News website)
A small display of light is alright – it’s the completely over the top displays which
use far too much electricity should be banned! We should not throw away important
resources on frivolous displays, they should all be turned off after 10pm. (BBC
News website)
Clearly, the symbolic economy is increasingly an important arena for classmaking
endeavours. The characteristics of excess attributed to Christmas light
displayers contrast with the class-oriented values of their critics, who imply that
they, conversely, carry out responsible, modest, skilful and tasteful modes of
consumption. And whilst selective cultural forms and practices originating in
working-class culture can be appropriated and rehabilitated as ‘kitsch’, and revalued
through their potential to express the detached and knowing irony of the
consumer, Christmas lights appear to be deemed to be excessive and irredeemable,
an expression of a (classed) essence rather than witty and cool. Such
critiques do not thus represent a ‘relaxation of aesthetic judgement and social
distinction’ (Potts, 2007: 4) but testify to the power of some to appropriate and
redefine cultural meanings only where they see fit.
The Motivations and Cultural Values of
Christmas Light Displayers
In order to explore the production of the Christmas light displays and the motivations
and understandings of their creators, we interviewed 22 householders
in Manchester and Sheffield. After driving round large areas of both cities it
became evident that the specific geography of Christmas light display was characterized
by its prevalence in housing estates that were originally council owned
as well as other areas of low cost private accommodation. Thus, a high proportion
of interviews took place in Wythenshawe, often termed the UK’s largest
council estate, and low cost private housing in Stretford, the areas with the
highest concentrations of displays. In areas of middle-class housing, such displays
were virtually non-existent. Displayers were recruited by posting letters
through their door to forewarn them of our interest and later contacting them
in person, after which an overwhelming majority consented to be interviewed.
It became apparent that a majority of interviewees were not working for various
reasons (retired, long term sick or unemployed) and tended to be middle
aged or older. We were concerned with displayers’ situated understandings to
reveal specific cultural values and dispositions. Accordingly, questions focused
upon the following themes: motivation for the initiation of the displays,
responses of neighbours, decisions about the style and content of displays, the
development of displays and plans for future decoration, practical issues of cost
and acquisition and opinions about critical responses to the displays.
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Despite the often virulent criticisms, displayers tended to respond with
blithe indifference or incomprehension to the tone and content of remarks,
although many were unaware of the jibes:
I can’t imagine anybody complaining to be quite honest. (David, 60–70, Sheffield,
retired builder)
If you were using their electricity or if you were infringing on their space something
like that then I could understand it, but if it’s your own property and you’re paying
the electricity bills I can’t understand it. (Linda, 60–70, David’s wife)
More overt responses to critics were not typified by any kind of loathing or
overt defensiveness. Instead, displayers tended to identify a Scrooge-like miserliness,
and a lack of (Christmas) spirit or communal sentiment:
They’re just grumpy, grumpy people. (Deborah, 30–39, Sheffield, housewife)
(They are) miserable and childish. They complain because they can’t be bothered
doing it. Idleness. They can’t be bothered doing it so why should anyone else do it.
Well I think a lot of it is to do with that they won’t spend the money on it: tight.
(John, 60–70, Manchester, retired)
We have had no complaints. No way. I mean how could it possibly be offensive?
You will always get one or two people what might complain ’cos they have nothing
better to do, and they are miserable people. I mean what about the young kids?
Them young kids love it … It’s about Christmas … I bet they don’t even have decorations
up in their house. I mean what do they do at Christmas? (Billie, 40–49,
Manchester, off work with ill-health)
Despite this lack of defensiveness, there is an insistence upon the right to display,
in the face of those who would regulate their activities, a sense that they
would battle to uphold their cultural rights:
I will never, ever take mine off this wall. I will put them up every single year. If it
upsets people then I’m sorry but they don’t need to come and have a look … I’m
sorry but tough, this is our way, our way of living. (Mary, 40–49, Manchester,
unemployed)
When it comes to distinguishing motivations for mounting the light displays,
certain imperatives do inform the arrangements, and the most important is that
displays should be colourful, bright and ‘cheerful’. One interviewee asserted
that there should be a variety of colourful lights but also advanced the ideal that
they should be vibrant and full of movement, an increasingly prominent feature
of the displays:
You’ve got to have different colours, it’s no good without a mixture of different
colours. We’ve got a lot flashing. They flash a lot some of them. All different colours
changing all the time. It’s good. I like the bells, always ringing, flashing and
moving. (Albert 60–70, Sheffield, retired bus driver)
The exuberance and density of many light displays, their dramatic illumination of
the nightscape, accord with displayers’ desire to imprint their festive presence. It is
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difficult to think of another strategy by which people of limited means could make
such an impression on everyday space: the glaring colours, flashing and moving
lights transform mundane housing estates into carnivalesque spectacles. The creation
of these festivals of illumination is informed by common sense aesthetic
assumptions about which particular colours are appropriate:
We prefer the colours to the white, and we certainly don’t like the blue. Blue is a
cold colour. I mean blue is not a Christmas colour is it? Reds and greens are
Christmas colours. Reds, greens and golds. Yes we only go for the Christmas colours
instead of the plain white or the blue. Well, it’s more of a colourful display that way.
(John, 60–70, Manchester, retired)
This understanding that Christmas colours are red and green implicitly critiques
the fashionable tendency to adopt particular ‘cold’ colours for festive domestic
and civic lighting, such as the minimalistic white spotlights used in domestic settings,
and the cobalt blue lights that illuminate trendy bars and restaurants.
One lamented that the modish white and blue lighting of the Christmas light
displays around a central Manchester thoroughfare resonated with a lack of festive
spirit, in glaring contrast to his and others’ displays.
The thing I will say to you is if you look around at Christmas now … let’s just say
for instance … Deansgate. And when you see people putting these types of decorations
up, like the ones we have outside, well it puts Deansgate to shame! (Billie,
40–49, Manchester, off work with ill-health)
Yet though strong norms govern colour choices, ideas about light assembly otherwise
rarely include notions of ‘good taste’ or discrete and artful arrangement,
in contrast to the design-oriented ideas which characterize middle-class house
and garden design. This lack of importance attached to sophisticated design
was made explicit by most interviewees in describing how they compose their
displays:
Well it’s all higgeldy piggeldly. There is no style about it – they go up the same way
every year. (Nell, 50–59, Manchester, housewife)
I just throw it up … it is that there, that goes there and that will do. It depends what
I pick up … I just fling it up: ‘Will it fit there? Well, fine.’ I have never thought about
it. No I have never actually thought about it. It is organised chaos. That’s the key.
(Debbie, 20–29, Manchester, housewife)
Elements from popular culture are often incorporated into displays, notably
large inflatables featuring media characters such as Homer Simpson. Criticism
of these features echoes concerns about the baleful influence of ‘mass’ or popular
culture on moral, collective, intellectual and aesthetic standards throughout
the 20th century. Miller (1995) highlights how Christmas has long been a complex
bricolage of numerous symbols, a blend of ‘traditional’ and ‘popular’,
ancient and modern, sacred and secular and ‘Christian and pagan’ elements, producing
displays that are inevitably profuse in matter, use and meaning. A proliferating
range of popular cultural forms allows celebrants to adopt and adapt a
range of icons and symbols. Such popular, often nostalgic symbols of Christmas
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might evoke notions of kitsch, and may indeed be ironically consumed as such
by middle-class onlookers. Yet while the self-awareness expressed by kitsch
enthusiasts is absent, such elements are regarded as humorous, as is exemplified
by two interviewees’ response to an act of vandalism on their display:
Three years ago someone stabbed Mr Frostie (the inflatable snowman). The wife put
the notice up like Crimestoppers: ‘For the arrest and prosecution of those who stabbed
Frostie …’ People were coming to the door for about three or four days and saying,
‘What’s happened to your snowman?’ and we’d say, ‘Oh someone’s stabbed him’ and
they’d say ‘Oh Dear, Oh Dear’. (Joseph, 60–70, Sheffield, off work with ill health)
There was people stopping me in the street asking how he was doing. One lady
asked if he was in intensive care! (Christine, 60–70, Joseph’s wife)
Instead, the incorporation of comical elements of popular culture is about the
production of homeliness, a communicative quality that ‘has a positive role in
the formation of sociality and is by no means relegated to being the other to
good taste’ (Miller, 2006: 246). Here the extended joke about Frostie forms the
basis for playful, humorous neighbourly interaction and festive communality,
what Miller identifies as the capacity to ‘create a sense of warmth, empathy and
comfort through (an) appeal to humour’ (p. 247).
Although concerns about ‘good taste’ and design are unimportant to displayers,
other objectives are far more significant in influencing the decision to
display. While tastemakers might favour certain colours, shapes and proportions
(see Londos, 2006), displayers privilege conviviality, neighbourliness and
festive pleasure.
Above all, it is the central importance of Christmas as a festival which produces
the desire to create a light display, for informants emphasize that this is a
time when shared doxic values of celebration, giving and friendliness should be
prioritized:
Some of them have got lights but most of them don’t even have the decorations up
and I think that’s dead miserable. IT’S CHRISTMAS! … Christmas to me is not a
religious thing it’s more of a family thing. It is about when you take time off from
the trials and tribulations of life and just take time off to appreciate what you have
at home. (Yvette, 50–59, Manchester, housewife)
To me it says celebrate Christmas. It’s a gift to share. That to me is what Christmas
is about, to appreciate what we’ve got. There’s so many people now that are letting
the tradition die off. I just think we should keep it going and it’s nice to keep kids
interested in what Christmas is about. (Albert 60–70, Sheffield, retired bus driver)
It’s dying out now Christmas. I mean Christmas is … for kids. Kids love it … either
you are going to be sad, or you are going to try and make yourself more happier. And
Christmas lights outside are going to give you that happy atmosphere and to be joyful.
That’s the message I’m giving. (Billie, 40–49, Manchester, off work with ill-health)
The overriding sentiment articulated above, and one repeated throughout most
interviews, is that the initial motivation for exhibiting a light display is to produce
a sense of family togetherness and enjoyment, particularly for child
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family members, a commonsense notion that may be generated by a sense that
in the past, such pleasures were unavailable:
(We never decorated) because I had a shite childhood (and now) … I want to make
sure the kids remember the Christmases as happy times. I suppose you could say to
some degree I’m compensating for that, but I just love it – it’s a family time innit?
(Stuart, 30–39, Manchester, occupation unknown)
Yet while the initial impetus might be family oriented, it quickly extends into a
desire to engender wider pleasure amongst friends and neighbours, particularly
their children. Accordingly, it is emphasized that Christmas is a time for conviviality,
communal pleasure, neighbourliness and generosity, in contradistinction
to the rest of the non-festive year:
Christmas is about sharing and this is a way of sharing and doing something for the
community, for people other than myself. It was just for my own kids and then for
everyone else’s kids around. They start to expect it now. When it gets to November they
start saying, ‘When are your lights going up?’ I get a lot of enjoyment out of it. When I
see the faces go past the window with a big smile on their face, not just the kids but
adults. They come from far and wide and it’s just good to see people coming down to
look at ’em and just smiling when they see all the lights. It just gives you that feeling of
satisfaction that you just done something for the community. As for last year I got a certificate
from the Community Alliance for the area to say thanks for brightening up the
community and a cheque for 50 pounds. (Trevor, 30–39, Sheffield, taxi driver)
An optimistic vision of a more communal world beyond Christmas is expressed;
the potential for future neighbourly intimacy through the establishment of ‘a
relationship between the celebrant and the world at large’ (Miller, 1995: 31).
The display is thus both carnivalesque and idealistic, for, as Miller astutely
asserts, the exhibition of lavishness is ‘both the inversion of the home as thrift
but also the embodiment of the home as the idiom for wider society’ (p. 21).
Yet this sense of idealism is not wholly illusory for the homely community is
produced in quotidian festive interaction:
Linda across the road she always brings her niece across to see them every year without
a doubt … Doris, next door (says) ‘I know it’s Christmas now ’cos you’ve got your
lights up’ … Mrs P across (the road) she very seldom opens her curtains but when we
have our lights on her curtains are open. It’s expected … (Another neighbour said) ‘I
thought you weren’t going to put them up this year and I’m missing ’em’. People do
expect us to do it and they do get as much pleasure as we do. Great comments and it
gees me up that people enjoy it. (David 60–70, Sheffield, retired builder)
The element of kindness in the motivation for the display is made clear by
Joseph, who opines that the extra spending entailed is worth the sacrifice,
implicitly refuting the notion that excessive expenditure is wasteful and reaffirming
the commonsense ethic that Christmas ought to allow an economy of
generosity to hold sway:
As long as you bring a bit of happiness into someone else’s life, put them up, blow
your electricity bill you can always pay that when it comes in! Neighbours enjoy it
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and people knock on the door and congratulate us for bringing a bit of cheer to the
road which is something and nothing really. It’s nothing to think about really to
put them up as long as it benefits other people. (Joseph, 60–70, Sheffield, off work
with ill health)
This freely chosen desire to communicate neighbourliness, pleasure and festivity
is apt to become a responsibility. Far from upsetting neighbours, displays
become expected and, consequently, displayers bear a communal obligation to
continue to set up illuminations and add new elements each year. This production
of neighbourly conviviality is thus not merely generated by the displayers
but becomes part of a collaborative understanding:
But it was funny this year as we were late putting them up and the neighbours were
coming and saying, ‘Is there anything wrong Nell? Are the lights not going up?’ I said
they will go up we are just busy at the minute. (Nell, 50–59, Manchester, housewife)
Our interviewees did not articulate narratives of decline that infect much commentary
about housing estates (see Watt, 2006) but, instead, their neighbourhood
was conceived as a site for grounding identity and reproducing social connections.
This sense of communal fellowship often encompasses neighbours from a different
ethnic and geographical background as recipients of the pleasures of illuminations,
refuting accusations of parochialism and racism cited above:
It brings … a lot of Asian people (from) up the road, people from East Africa, and
you’ve got Slovaks and people from the Yemen, I think they enjoy it. It’s not their
Christmas but I think they enjoy it as well, especially the kids. (Joseph, 60–70,
Sheffield, off work with ill health)
There was little evidence of inward-looking mentality but rather an acknowledgement
that their neighbourhood was multicultural and that their lights
could be enjoyed by all, irrespective of religion or ethnicity. A live and let live
understanding of the ethos of festivity encouraged displayers to appreciate the
attempts of others from different cultural, religious, ethnic and sexual backgrounds
to produce forms of illumination, carnival and communal rituals:
Another point that I have found this year is that a neighbour, I don’t know them, I
think they are Indian, had lit their house up for Eid … in October, November and
we all said ‘Good God lights up already?’ But that’s what it was. If they enjoy it, (let
them) get on with it! (Nell, 50–59, Manchester, housewife)
This liberal outlook is often underpinned by nostalgic representations of
yesteryear, which offer exemplary occasions of communitas and celebration, in
contrast with the recent disappearance of collective festive occasions. However,
although this disappearance fuels a sense of loss, there is an acknowledgement
that new festive forms may emerge:
Now if I go back thirty years ago, to Whit week, you would have all the walks. You
couldn’t move in Manchester, from Piccadilly and Deansgate all the way down …
you would have the bands – marching boys brigade, scouts … it was jam packed
with bands. Hundreds of people would go there on Whit week. Well it’s not there
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no more it’s gone. The Whit week was the biggest celebration I have ever seen in me
life … anybody my age will tell you … The only thing that they have like that now
is when the queers do their march … in the gay town. I have never been there
myself, but people say that’s brilliant and people come from all over the country.
And then on Wilmslow Road when the Muslims have their celebration – you can’t
move down there! And they are all enjoying themselves! Let them do it! That’s the
way I look at it. (Billie, 40–49, Manchester, off work with ill-health)
In some cases, an engagement in neighbourly participation goes beyond the
responsibility of one or two key households but encompasses most of the
houses in a street or close. While these closely connected households may also
participate in communal events at other times of the year, such as Bonfire Night
and Easter, Christmas is the most important time for such celebrations:
We always put the lights on at 6pm on the first Sunday in December, and not a second
earlier or later! Everyone in the street gathers round; it’s a big event … It turns
into a party. One year we had all the old people from the old folks’ home come down
with their zimmer frames. My wife is going to give them all a bottle of whiskey next
year when they make it down … The other neighbours do it too – so it’s a street display
… You see we are a very friendly street. In the summer we have barbeques and
wash the cars; every year we organise a camping trip with all the families together …
We used to have bonfires every year, but after 10 years that got boring, so we get the
kids all dressed up for VE day. On the turn of the millennium in 1999, we started
collecting money from every house. We got £2000 together. We bought an army
tent – that cost £700!... We put it up on New Year’s Eve. We all did our own street
acts … We all put our displays up together, go out together, put the lights up as a
street and then on the 6th we all take them down. The week after the first Sunday
when the lights go up we all have Christmas dinner, the adults only. We go out and
book somewhere and have our meal. (Steve, 50–59, Manchester, factory manager)
Finally, the need to think of others at Christmas is reinforced by those who are also
concerned with creating displays for charitable reasons as well as for neighbourly
purposes. Several have donation boxes for particular charitable causes.
Three years ago I got throat cancer, so I decided to do it for Christies (local Cancer
Hospital). I just put (out a) collection box for Christies, (but) they don’t know I’m
doing it for them. (Roy, 60–70, Manchester, retired due to ill-health)
Although the displayers should not be taken as ‘typical’ working-class subjects,
they express shared class-oriented values of festive spirit, conviviality, generosity
and community that are consolidated amongst friends and neighbours,
within ‘proximate spheres of intimacy’ and inside a particular cultural, ‘physical
and social location’ (Fernandez Kelly, 1994: 89). Within this realm, the
recognition and support they receive for their festive endeavours produces a
sense of worth and local form of cultural capital. Although a target for certain
middle-class and would-be-middle-class critics, these critical missiles rarely penetrate
this world where ‘working class culture is not point zero of culture;
rather, it has a different value system, one not recognised by the dominant symbolic
economy’ (Skeggs, 2004: 136). Accordingly, displayers are not victims of
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the culturally powerful, for they ‘steadfastly refuse the authority of the judgements
and the value system from which it emerges’ (Skeggs, 2005: 976).
The esteem visited upon displayers by neighbours evidently contributes to
the acquisition of social capital, producing and referencing ‘the positive outcomes
of sociability, cohesiveness and connection to community’ (Warr, 2005:
286). Yet, though this status is acquired through the display of commodities,
such consumption practices are better understood as facilitating family and
neighbourhood cohesion and intimacy (Carrier, 1995) rather than advertising
‘good taste’ or wealth. Such an outlook chimes with Kuper’s assertion that
Christmas is an occasion when a utopian vision can be proposed, a ‘time out
for alternative values’ (1995: 172), a period in which generosity, family harmony
and pleasure coexist. These seasonal values also draw upon ‘traditional’
working-class values of independence, skill, respectability and solidarity
(Savage, 2000), romantic concepts which haunt the present with a sense of loss
and nostalgia for the unrealized possibilities of ‘community’.
Conclusion
We have highlighted two different arenas through which Christmas illumination
is utilized to make class, first through the ongoing representation of displayers
as an imagined lowly, rough working class, or as ‘chavs’, via websites
and other media; and second, through the motivations, understandings and values
of those who produce such displays in working-class locales. This distinction
between the mediatized and grounded performance of class might suggest
that the former is the kind of cultural text analysed by a ‘decorative’ sociology
that has replaced more structural, historical, empirical explorations of class
(Rojek and Turner, 2000). However, as mediatized constructions expand their
influence and filter down into everyday expressions, they are every bit as ‘real’
in their class-making consequences as those grounded in place, whether this is
projected onto ‘others’ or wielded by the self. Such cultural practices do not
merely descend into micro-politics, and neither are they disconnected from
wider economic processes. For value-laden assertions in media criticisms of displayers
reveal the ongoing constitution of certain middle-class and would-be
middle-class identities around taste, consumption and lifestyle and the attendant
requirement to carve out distinction through marking distance and difference.
The naming of the ‘chav’ through differentiating the self from an other,
consolidates the epistemological salience of that which it names but also ‘classifies
the classifier’ (Bourdieu, 1986). On the other hand, the less self-conscious
practices of the displayers are imbued with a set of doxic values which produce
an idealized working-class identity and space. We might contrast these collective
practices as economies of status-production and generosity (see Bromberg,
2009). Yet what is particularly striking is that these class-making practices are
fostered and sustained within rather enclosed networks.
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Negative myths about working-class displayers collectively reproduced
amongst active internet participants accord with wider defamatory discourses
about ‘chavs’ and the like, and, here, misrecognize them through the ascription
of ‘essential characteristics’ through which they are ‘positioned and fixed’
(Skeggs, 2004: 4). Such iterative representations tend not be confounded
because they are rarely disabused by actual encounter with the people so vilified.
The lack of any dialogic encounter between these producers of class meaning
is because the two networks through which such meanings are produced do
not intersect.
As far as media comment is concerned, much online interaction involves
the meeting of ‘like-minded’ individuals, leading to a fragmented public
sphere of insulated ‘deliberative enclaves’ where group positions and practices
are reinforced rather than openly critiqued (Dahlberg, 2007).
Accordingly, because users usually ‘filter’ information and interactions and
‘self-select’ what they are exposed to, the myriad of diverse online views
rarely intersect, undermining the potential for understanding differently situated
others. This limitation is further entrenched by the ways in which
asymmetries in offline social, cultural and economic capital lead to asymmetries
between voices online. Dahlberg (2007) further contends that the
absence of ‘general interest intermediaries’ or ‘deliberative domains’, found
in older media outlets like national newspapers and broadcasters, produces
a lack of shared communicative spaces.
Yet while the mediated expressions depicted above vibrate with symbolic
violence, it does not follow that the objects of their scorn are victimized. For
within the social environment of working-class displayers, participation
within local horizontal networks facilitates the attainment of status and a
positive sense of social identity. Amongst displayers, this class-identity making
process does not produce a working class ‘for itself’, but it relies upon
shared values of community, family, festivity, generosity and nostalgia to produce
a neighbourly space that is working class ‘in itself’. However, this local
status is not usually transmissible because vertical connections to wider networks
through which individuals might ‘link to a wider range of social contacts
and opportunities’ are largely unavailable for ‘a paucity of bridging ties
is likely to restrict social contacts with people in other communities’ (Warr,
2005: 287) and restrict the respectful sharing of cultural values between
class-oriented neighbourhoods. Because they are culturally stigmatized
through associations with place, the festive values of the Christmas light displayers
are misrecognized outside their immediate sphere. The myth of the
‘chav’ thus circulates within deliberative media enclaves and is not
disrupted by the subjects it denigrates.
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank Emily Falconer, Panni Poke Loh and all the interviewees.
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Notes
1 BBC News website, talk forum, 30 December 2004: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/
talking_point/4104297.stm. The 120 responses featured supposedly ‘reflected
the balance of opinion’ towards the question: ‘Are outdoor Christmas decorations
tacky or just a bit of festive fun?’ Approximately one third of responses
were moderately or highly critical, a third were positive and celebratory, and the
remainder ambivalent. This site gives a broader indication of the responses to
Christmas lights than can be covered in this article.
2 The chavscum website is now either defunct or dormant.
3 Xmas Lights Competition 2006, 12 November: Chavscum website:
http://www.chavscum.co.uk/forum//showthread.php?p=745258 The website
asks for user contributions with the following appeal:
Now Bonfire Night has come and gone a Chav’s mind starts to become preoccupied
with the festive season. An annual competition begins to see which Chav on their
sink estate can festoon their hovel with the most Christmas lights possible from the
pound shop. Forget global warming and their carbon footprint, if they aren’t using
5kw/hr of electricity to power their spectacle they will have failed miserably!
4 C. Osuh, ‘Christmas comes early at house of lights’, 10 October 2006:
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/comments/view.html?story_id=
225128 18 out of 24 comments responding to the above article are negative
about the light displays.
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Tim Edensor
Is a Reader in Cultural Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University.He is the author
of Tourists at the Taj (1998), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2002) and
Industrial Ruins: Space,Aesthetics and Materiality (2005). He has written widely on tourism,
urban and rural geographies,mobilities,working-class identities,football and materiality.He
is currently researching landscapes of illumination, geographies of rhythm and the properties
and origins of building stone.
Address: Manchester Metropolitan University, Environmental and Geographical
Sciences, John Dalton Building, Chester Street, Manchester, M1 5GD, UK.
E-mail: t.edensor@mmu.ac.uk
Steve Millington
Is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has
jointly edited Cosmopolitan Urbanism and more recently themed issues about geographies
of everyday life for Environment and Planning A, and banal mobilities for Social and
Cultural Geography. He has recently co-authored papers on football branding for Global
Networks, and is currently co-editing a volume for Routledge with Tim Edensor, Norma
Rantisi and Deborah Leslie, Spaces of Vernacular Creativity: Reconsidering the Creative
Class and Creative Clusters. Steve is currently researching inter-generational geographies
of outdoor play and outdoor spaces of decorative illumination.
Address: Manchester Metropolitan University, Environmental and Geographical Sciences,
Chester St, Manchester, M1 5GD, UK.
E-mail: s.millington@mmu.ac.uk
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