My Eyes! My Eyes!
Compelled by the debate surrounding the government's latest tourism idea gaudy monstrosity, I ventured to Central.
Halfway across Victoria Harbour, aboard the Star Ferry, my eyes about melted out of their sockets when I saw the top half of the garish, plastic Christmas tree flashing its lights near Statue Square.
The tourism board has named it the Christmas Wishing Tree. Many folks wish it would go away. It's so hideous that David Tang, of Shanghai Tang fame, wrote this acerbic letter:
Looking at the utterly ghastly Christmas tree in Statue Square, Central, I wonder if it is not too much to ask for the vapid Hong Kong Tourism Board at least to engage someone with even an atomic modicum of style or an amoebic degree of taste so as to present Hong Kong with the slightest hint of sophistication?
Snarky, ain't he?
Not everyone dislikes it.
"It symbolises hope, family, togetherness," said salesman Jack Wilson, 31, as he passed the tree yesterday. "It is not about how good-looking the tree is but how it makes you feel ... and that is festive. It is loud, brash, bright and bold. It is a Hong Kong Christmas tree. It is perfect."
I wouldn't go so far as to call it perfect.
In contrast, Festival Walk in Kowloon Tong unveiled a beautiful, massive 20-metre-tall tree decorated with over 100,000 pieces of Swarovski crystal worth about $5 million.
Harbour City and Pacific Place shopping malls have also done an excellent job decorating for Christmas, much nicer than the tree the tourism board coughed up.
But why all the effort? Christmas in Hong Kong isn't the same as in North America. I don't feel any Christmas Spirit, but then I'd lost it long ago in Canada when Christmas turned into little more than an annual consumer free-for-all.
In Hong Kong, Lunar New Year is the big deal. It won't take long to dispatch the Christmas decorations in favour of reds and golds for the Year of the Monkey.
Having risked blindness with the Christmas Wishing Tree, I'm all for it.
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