Santa Claus goes corporate and so has to lose weight, Christmas gets downsized, Renault brings happiness to the holidays and Tango is the official drink of Christmas!
It's not hot news that Christmas is the greatest manifestation of consumer power and capitalist frenzy as consumers stream to the streets and stores to buy and buy and buy again in an exasperating, delirious mania of collective spending that spreads in an epidemic fashion. It's neither news that many corporations take advantage of the same icons and iconoclastic figures that consumers identify as relevant to the Chritsmas tune, especially Santa Claus.
I found this nice story "Santa Claus vs. The Marketers"
Interesting and funny read. From the same story, the belows introduces the PDF story (only 223 K):
"When Santa Claus finds his popularity waning, the directors of Claus Inc. vote to bring in a group of marketers on board to refine his 'brand' and improve his business processes. But the cure can be worse than the problem, and when problems with CRM, privacy issues, and copyright infringement may make Claus Inc. miss the Christmas shipping deadline, Santa launches an undercover project to get the gifts out on time". The website featuring the story is called: Damn fine writing: taking the hell out of business writing. Hilarious!
For more on the more or less same corporate obscenity, visit the Captive State website and read the extract" Good book by a good writer [George Monbiot] too if you're interested in the globalisation vs. anti-globalisation match.
In the words of George Monbiot:
"The Christmas Liberation Front first struck in December 1997. Manchester’s celebrations had been sponsored that year by Renault, and the generous donor, in a surfeit of seasonal spirit, had attached its own logo to the top of the municipal Christmas tree. In the dead of night a person or persons unknown climbed the tree, removed the Renault diamond and replaced it with a gold star. Christmas, their organization declared, had been restored to the people.
Manchester’s seditious guardians of the public realm are not alone in their efforts to prevent Christmas from becoming a corporate acquisition. In 1998, Westminster City Council sought to prevent the Regent Street Association from using Britain’s most celebrated display of Christmas lights to reveal that this was ‘The season to be Tango’d’: a soft drinks manufacturer had paid for the display. But the association had applied for planning permission so late that the council realized that if this exhibition were banned there would be no lights on Regent Street at all. The following year, in the hope of averting similar manifestations of excessive generosity, the council helped pay for the lights itself. The authority could scarcely claim to be impervious to the persuasions of the pound, however: at the time of writing it is planning to invite a corporate sponsor to attach its name to the ‘Welcome to Westminster’ signs beside major approach roads, in return for a ‘seven-figure contribution’ to the council’s new promotional scheme."
Merry Christmas to you all:-)
4:32:15 PM 
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