The commercialization of Christmas is nothing new

Upstairs, ceiling-mounted spots glow hotly on this season’s stars; outside their crisp ovals of light, we can barely see one another. There’s a rustle of anticipation: sotto voce whispers, shift of purse straps, murmur of fabric.

It’s a show. It’s a club. No, it’s…shopping in the 21st century. Specifically, it’s the compelling and surreal interior of the flagship Abercrombie & Fitch store at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street.

If you haven’t been inside an A&F store, you’ve certainly seen their billboards or magazine ads — black and white photographs of waifish girls and cut-jawed boys, jeans riding just under their hipbones.

At the midtown Manhattan store, that vibe seeps out to the sidewalk, where customers line up to have their photographs taken with a male Abercrombie model: all muscled, hairless torso and fashionable facial scruff. Not so different, I think, from the scene a few blocks away, where patrons haunt the stage door after a hit musical (though those performers had to at least sing and dance to earn all that giddy approbation).

In with the in crowd

At A&F, I half-expect to be charged admission. Or bounced. At my teen daughter’s request, I’ve dressed a spot better than usual (which is to say, not the frayed-elbow sweater I’ve worn since college). Still, I’m clearly out of my league among the willowy mannequins and twentysomething clerks, who sport Broadway-style headsets over haircuts I suspect cost more than my monthly electric bill.

And when I approach one of those clerks — a woman with darkly fringed eyes and legs long enough to cross the state line — with a pair of $78 jeans in my arms and manage to squeak out, “Are these on sale?” she responds evenly, “Nothing is on sale here. Ever.”

It would be easy to skewer all this as one more sick sign of commerce gone amok. But hold on just a moment, and think of your grandmothers. Or mine. You know, the ones who put on pearls and powder to shop at the stately old houses of the department store’s heyday. Think of those stores and their gleaming cosmetic counters, their elevators (“fifth floor, ladies’ lingerie”), the meet-me-at-the-eagle grandeur of it all.

The more things change . . .

Indeed, raise your hand if you grew up in Philly, as I did, and ever stood in a restless line, between velveteen barricades flocked with fake snow, to see the Enchanted Colonial Village at Lit Brothers department store or hurt your neck ogling the light show at Wanamaker’s. The Brothers Lit, along with Misters Strawbridge and Gimbel and all the rest, knew they had a winning formula: lure us in with spectacle, and surely, we’d shop.

And we did. Until the suburban malls wooed us with free parking, the Big Box stores dangled discount prices, and the Web showed us we could buy pretty much whatever we wanted while remaining in our jammies. The elegant retail giants of my youth — with their toy departments and 8th-floor restaurants serving Cobb salad to ladies who lunched — are history.

We left Abercrombie empty-handed — even my daughter thought it was absurd to pay nearly 80 bucks for jeans — and walked a few blocks south and west, past the long lines of shoppers waiting to enter the Apple Store, the M&M emporium, and FAO Schwarz.

Broadway bound

Once we hit the theater district, we couldn’t move eight steps without having someone thrust something toward our hands: a shiny card advertising Chicago or Mamma Mia! or another Broadway blockbuster. Television screens outside the theaters played endless loops of showstopping anthems. Store windows were crammed with Broadway merchandise: DVDs of Matilda, sheet music for Once, Lion King snow globes, Les Mis mugs.

Back on Fifth Avenue, retail stores were putting on an extravagant show. But here, it seemed the opposite: Theater had become a platform for merchandise. Once more, I was set to grouch: See, another win for shameless consumerism, another score for stuff. It’s not enough that people pay $150 a seat — they still need to shell out $34.95 for an If/Then T-shirt?

And then I saw the woman in the wicked tights. I mean, the Wicked tights. That’s right: a pair of form-fitting leggings with the unmistakable logo of the “good” witch whispering into the ear of the (slyly smiling) “bad” one, just like the billboard that’s been hovering over Times Square since George W. Bush was president. Red, white, black, and Elphaba-green, the design stretched by the curve of the wearer’s calves yet was completely recognizable.

I turned around and watched those tights get swallowed by the crowd. And my first thought was not: Yeesh, the marketers really have gone crazy. My first thought was: Where I can get a pair of those?

Because as much as I scoff at materialism, as much as I satirize the A&F circus or skewer the ascendance of show over substance, I’m only human. I want things. I’m suckered in — just like my Bubbies, just like you — by advertising and curiosity and the sway of the crowd. I’ve gone shopping out of boredom, fatigue, and grief. I’ve brought home sacks of stuff and still felt empty.

Life, unscripted

Which is why it came as a relief, after our jaunts on Fifth Avenue and Broadway, to take a walk on the quieter side. Down in Chelsea, a man grimaced and paced. “So, are you gonna be in Joisey City, or what?” he asked his phone. Meanwhile, a woman power walked and chatted simultaneously: “Mom, you never answered my email about the baby pool.” On the subway, a woman with a silver tiara and a swipe of crimson lipstick sat across from a woman fingering a set of Nepalese prayer beads.

This was the real thing, unscripted, indelible: a child rolling down the hill at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a guy wearing a snake around his shoulders, my daughter and me on the corner of Avenue B near the cusp of a new year, just standing there with a sudden stab of gratitude for being alive, for the city swirling around us, for everything that can’t be packaged, bought, or sold.

Ask me what I want for Chanukah, for winter solstice, for the rest of my life. I’ll tell you: More of that.