The “Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.”
-Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

There isn’t much particularly luminous about this photo. In it—a large tree, two stop signs, a handicapped parking spot, and 42 tiny replicas of the Liberty Bell.  It’s the storefront of a Macy’s in Los Angeles, California, captured by who knows who from who knows when. I found it on the internet when I was trying to sort why on earth there are so many replicas of the Liberty Bell.  Turns out, the Liberty Bell went “viral” before the concept “viral” did—but that’s a different newsletter.

These are stock images of Cherry Creek Mall in Denver, Colorado, where I grew up. If they feel generic to you, you’re right. Exactly how I remember them. I left Denver in 2004, two years before Macy’s (pictured above) replaced Foley’s. When I was a regular at Cinnabon, buying cheap chokers at Claire’s, and trying to figure out what it meant to become a young adult (by the by, the mall was not particularly illuminating on this front), I had no idea the complex sat atop a sanitary landfill from the 1940s. I had my first kiss there and would call my mom from a bank of pay phones. The young boy who stuck his tongue in my mouth now works for Goldman Sachs. 

The photo on the left from Temple’s Urban Archives features workmen putting up a 50-foot Christmas tree in front of Philadelphia’s City Hall in 1960. The photo on the right isn’t a tree, it’s a box, or “The Present”—a glowing, 27-foot-tall, walk-through holiday gift box from, well, yesterday, 2019. It’s 20 feet away from a little stand where I am selling fancy chocolate for $15/hr for the month of December at a thing called Christmas Village in Philadelphia’s LOVE park. There will be countless images of “The Present” on Instagram, owned by Facebook, owned by Mark Zuckerberg, who also once had a first kiss somewhere not labeled in this newsletter and who now makes around $15 billion per year.

Philadelphia’s Wanamaker’s—now a Macy’s— was the first store in the world to be lighted by electricity. When the store was first lit for Christmas in 1878, crowds cowered a half-block away from the store, afraid the building would blow up. One hundred and fifty years later, “100,000 bright, energy-efficient LED lights” are a selling point for the famous Christmas light show, which originated in 1948 in the brain of a theatre graduate from Yale.

When Philadelphia claimed “workshop of the world” status in the early 20th century, Wanamaker’s stood as one of the Big Five retailers and popularized the one-stop-shop experience—a torch carried forward into the 21st century by places like Target, Walmart, and onto the internet by, yup, you got it, Amazon (years prior to its 1994 beginning, Jeff Bezos kicked around the idea of an “everything store" while he worked on Wall Street for D.E. Shaw). I wonder if your brain is like mine where the word “Amazon” no longer recalls a river or a rainforest, but rather a convex arrow equated with a smile on a cardboard box. According to the Atlantic, Bezos controls nearly 40% of all e-commerce in the United States. You can’t get stats on what % of our brain is controlled by whom. Yet.

I’ve been having trouble clocking out of my shift at Christmas Village, which I do via an app on my iPhone 5s, which doesn’t hold battery charge anymore. It dies in the cold. Plum shuts down. I had a moment of remorse when I didn’t think to cash in on Black Friday deals by getting a new and functional phone. For now, my phone goes dark. My manager might also think I’m a pain in the ass. Read Liat Berdugo’s long form essay on the halos of devices, if you’re into that.

I turn 34 at the end of this month, two days (and then some) after Jesus. My teeth are a shade yellower than they used to be. I’ve never used whitening strips, but I wonder if my pride will get the best of me (perhaps I should order a fancy electric toothbrush from Amazon?). I’ve noticed too, since the years of AIM on AOL and the Cherry Creek Mall, my computer has slowly morphed into the architecture of my life as a default physical and mental home base. I return to it for work. I return to it for a kind of company. I return to it for an escape. A pseudo-hearth. These cliches may or may not be your truth, but they are part of mine. People like to gather around something.

"The Hellenists taught us that the household in classical Greece was watched over by two deities: Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, at the shadowy, feminine center of the household; and the outward-looking Hermes, god of the threshold, protector of exchanges and of the men who monopolized them. Today the television and the computer have replaced the hearth. Hermes has taken Hestia's place."  -from Non-Places by Marc Auge

As I take stock, I ask myself what I have let in and what I need to let out.
May you tend to your fire—bright and dark, merry or otherwise.

Yours, on two freak feet,
Jenna

P.S. Read The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu. You can borrow my copy or order from Abebooks.com or some other Amazon alternative. Along similar lines, a wikipedia co-founder has launched WT:Social, which will be funded by donations, rather than advertising. As Wu says, "No one is born wanting 4K television, a purse branded by Hermes or Louis Vuitton, or the odor eliminator product Febreeze." Read George Monbiot’s essay on The Gift of Death.

P.P.S. On the colder side, listen to ice. Try this off the internet too. With a nod toward Krampus or Frau Perchta, look at Charles Freger’s series Wilder Mann and watch this clip from the documentary “UR Musig”. What we welcome to our centers has power, as does what we deny.