What is all this Easy to understand steps

No means of escape to a page where everything is white, since the iPod to the boots, skull press-paper and the lamp of atmosphere. On another, everything is red, the bag and the toaster with radio watch. A the following - surprise! -nothing but golden objects. Later - but where do then seek both ideas -the same trinkets, roughly, are silver. Finally, the page where everything is black, the boots to the iPod, the iPhone or the iPad. This unchanging ritual, are we the be the same every year. Sometimes, let's be honest, there are blue, orange, pailletés, fluo gifts. Average price: at least 1,000 euros. Spikes to 20,000 or 30,000, although flights beyond, and a few selections below 10 euros, by exotic.

What is all this Easy to understand steps. These innumerable supplements, catalogues and special notebooks engulfing the reader when it comes to winter. They are not really function to reduce anxiety of the consumer at the time of Father Christmas. On the contrary, they would rather to intensify the stress of the gift to choose. Because, in these icy representations, is not the idea. So, what is their role Increase advertising revenue It is obvious, but also an insufficient explanation. Because the same objective could be achieved in other ways, more realistic and less luxurious. The problem is the style: cold frozen unreal object, the fairly ugly useless, the dream in showcase, the approach of the winter solstice.

It's consuming images, virtual, possible worlds. Purchases seem secondary. The representation is enough - remote, Ethereal, formatted. It provokes the desire and the dissolved. One suddenly dreams of products which it had no idea a few minutes before. The image is promise a pleasure new - unexpected and rare, as detached from the world - immediately replaced by another, indefinitely. These catalogues are of the territories is that verge, without depth surfaces where the eye slides. You might think that they embody what Gilles Lipovetsky, as early as 1983, named "The era of vacuum". But the philosopher, diagnosed in the consumerism, a semblance of humor, a sense of parody and playful hedonism. This is who seems to have entirely disappeared supplements gifts, desperately serious and predictable. The Elves are unemployed, Santa Claus is not there for laughs.

It is far, definitely, the time where, with the blessing of the Church, it burned the effigy of Santa Claus on the parvis of the Cathedral. As in Dijon, December 24, 1951. Before a few hundred children of sponsorships, the man in red, charged with paganiser day, was hanged in grids and reduced ash. Claude Lévi-Strauss has devoted to this story a fascinating study, "Santa Claus soldier". He established there how Santa Claus extended, in the last century, the ancient King of the Saturnalia and the préchrétien legacy: gui, gifts and lavish packages were already Roman Affairs. Nothing new under the tree! "Rest i.e. concluded Lévi-Strauss with any malice, if modern man cannot defend him also his rights to be pagan.".

What is new, it is the lethal boredom of this imaginary world where everything seems déréalisé. These gifts pages evoke not more ancient holiday that the difficulties of the time. Did it sparkles that a universe without poor and budgetary constraints, where no one is talking about the Ireland, the Portugal, the euro area and the misery of the people. White candlestick, fluo boots, black helmet and mules silver, it sometimes have the courage to dispose of it. History of find, a beautiful pristine winter morning as snow in the aube field what then A page where, really, everything is white.