Take A Christmas Carol, which wheedles all you Bob Cratchits out there into feeling grateful for your overpopulated hovels and crippled children and allows the modern-day Scrooges to fantasize about sharing their wealth before they have a few brandies and forget all about it. Black Nativity is a different kind of emotional bullying, a pitch-perfect diversity consultant's wet dream that melodically shouts at you to get the Jesus joy. But because they're multiculturalists, you can be happy for Kwanzaa or Hanukkah or a cold, godless universe--but you'd better damn well be joyful about something.
The anti-holiday performances aren't as satisfying as you'd think. The street puppetry zealots jerking around on Buy Nothing Day are uninspiring at best and the shows that advertise themselves as an escape from all the other holiday plays seem desperate, like the average person who consistently describes himself as an overachiever. It's all very sad.
This year, my holiday spectacle pick is the magic indoor snow at Pacific Place. Every evening at 6:00 p.m., glazed-eyed shoppers and fidgety children are soothed with the faint tinklings of the Charlie Brown theme and lightly dusted with white stuff that looks like snow at a distance. Of course, it isn't snow but MagicSnow--that is, according to a Pacific Place press release, "90 percent water and is a biodegradable, nontoxic, nonstaining, eco-friendly snowflake." Up close, it looks like a colony of tiny soap bubbles.
"Do you like the snow?" I asked 4-year old Juris Balodis. He nodded.
"Did you taste the snow?" He made a yuck face. MagicSnow also tastes like a colony of tiny soap bubbles.
I watched a nearby security guard keep a close eye on dancing children, to make sure none slipped. MagicSnow evaporates too quickly to make puddles, but you can't be too careful. I asked him if children always danced when the MagicSnow started falling.
"I'm not authorized to answer that question," he said. "But I'll show you the person who can."
We took an elevator to the third-floor balcony where a PR woman stood watching the scene. I asked her a few questions about MagicSnow and she nodded and answer vaguely. What was there to say? No message, no moral--just dancing children and an indoor weather phenomenon that made the whole place look like the kind of place where Harry Potter might eat a stale biscotti while browsing overpriced wands. It's simple and quiet. What you see is what you get. Which is all I really want.
