The Holidays: Parties, Man-hugging, Friends and Santa’s Fashion

The Hungarian Countess Louise J. Esterhazy was a revered — and feared — chronicler of the highs — and generally lows — of fashion, society, culture and more. It seems the Esterhazy clan by nature is filled with strong opinions, because WWD Weekend has been contacted by the Countess’ long-lost nephew, the Baron Louis J. Esterhazy, who has written from Europe to express his abhorrence of numerous modern fashion and cultural developments. The Baron’s pen is as sharp as his late aunt’s and here is his latest column on the not-always-warm summer season.

The “holiday season” is here. That means so many different things to different people. First there was Thanksgiving and now we are counting the days until Christmas. No two festivities could be more different although, of course, for most both involve gatherings of family and friends. 

While Thanksgiving is a single tidy punctuation point — that last Thursday in November, ever since so decreed by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1901 — which may, at most, spill into taking the Friday off work, the Christmas period starts, according to some stores, as early as October. Harrods in London, owned by the Qataris, a noted non-Christian society, ironically gets into the Christmas swing in September.

Christmas parties can easily start in late November and that fairy-light spirit extends into early January. In Spain and South America, for some reason, they get way more excited on Jan. 6 — the Día de Los Reyes Magos — than they do at Christmas. No one can explain to me all the hoopla around three guys who showed up two weeks late to celebrate a birth. 

Remarkably, for the world’s most successful commercial nation, Thanksgiving involves very little cheap decoration. Few households pull out dusty boxes of Thanksgiving-themed stuff — although there are the overly enthusiastic who put up turkey figurines, pilgrims and what have you — and even Hallmark’s most creative minds know that trying to encourage Americans to send their nearest and dearest a “Happy Thanksgiving” card would generally be greeted with lip-curling scorn.

It’s about gathering together the extended family and sharing one massive and sometimes quite weird feast (does anyone look forward to candied sweet potatoes and marshmallow?) and that is about the long and short of it. Plus of course the ever-important game of football. Hats off to the USA for keeping it pure and simple. 

Christmas, on the other hand, can turn into an endless, exhausting and liver-failing round of parties. Here the boundaries and definition of friendships can really test the limit. Seasonal FOMO leads people to accept invitations from those barely known and sometimes not even particularly liked. Never is it easier to distinguish one’s real friends from one’s “party friends.” And at a Christmas gathering, a party friend is just perfect for those three to four minutes of superficial interaction, clinging to a warm glass of prosecco. Both parties know that the friendship is as shallow as a summer’s rainstorm puddle, but still one does the hugging and plastic smiling. 

On the subject of hugging, especially the man-on-man hug: Would someone please codify the rules for us guys? Apparently, an old-style handshake is considered unfriendly, even hostile, according the General Quartiermeister (aka, the German wife), who tells me just to go ahead and hug everyone, even if I don’t know their name. I have to confess I remain a fan of the old-school handshake, as with that everyone knew where they stood, quite literally. 

Nowadays, two men meet and they do an awkward dance of moving in toward each other, like mating Emperor penguins on an ice floe, in order to show that they are properly “in touch” with their emotions. But then comes the moment when one fellow might physically and literally push back and you find yourself suddenly doing the “half hug,” which can be augmented by the “buddy-boy-back-slap” — this combo is the one where the two right arms do a semi-sumo-wrestler grasp up to each other’s elbow, while the left arm wheels around to pat (or is it slap?) the back. Both parties know that it’s physically and emotionally awkward, but doing anything less these days seems to broadcast to the world one needs serious therapy. 

And at the Christmas party, with the flow of dubious punch, (that no one in their right mind would serve at any other time of the year), after about 9 or 10 p.m., the man hugging becomes a competitive sport. That character who you haven’t seen in 18 months, since he made a questionable line call on the tennis court, is coming at your with arms as open as the pontiff himself. 

The General Quartiermeister’s family is so enormous it could populate a small nation. She insists that kinship trumps friendship any time. At one seasonal gathering at a leaky Belgian castle several years ago, about 60 showed up for a festive lunch and most were there until past midnight. Europeans delight in their extended families, whereas I know some Brits and Americans who spend much time and energy avoiding their families. “You choose your friends. Your family are thrust upon you,” they mutter. And, if you are a member of that dying breed, the British landed aristocracy, because of primogeniture, where the eldest boy literally inherits everything, he spends the rest of his life actively avoiding his impoverished and resentful siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews. The holidays are surely hell for such a person. 

At the end of the holiday season, you know more clearly who your friends truly are. They are either the ones who haven’t been driven into hiding in your bedroom or even to the vodka bottle, or they are the people who one still actively seeks out when the decorations are mercifully packed away. 

We are all sometimes at fault for thinking that our circle of friends is more or less finite. The General Quartiermeister harangues me for not being more open to new people. She said I remind her of a passage from Isabel Colegate’s fabulous book “The Shooting Party,” set in a grand country house — “Downton Abbey” style, all around an Edwardian pheasant slaughter.

The weekend household consists of various aristocrats, plutocrats and tycoons of the age. One elegant wife turns to her haughty husband, a leading figure in society and asks, “Do you suppose there are some other people, somewhere, people we don’t know?” 

“What sort of people?” he asks. 

“Perfectly charming people. Really delightful, intelligent, amusing, civilized.…And we don’t know them, and nobody we know knows them. And they don’t know us and they don’t know anybody we know.”

After a brief pause, her husband contemptuously answers, “It’s impossible!” 

So, if you find yourself at such a festive gathering and you want to avoid the mind-numbing conversation, here’s a holiday tip for you: Suggest to the men (preferably after they are already a tad “worse for wear”) that you’ll bet that they can’t tell the difference between a Scotch whisky, a French cognac and a dark rum. Every man unfailingly accepts the challenge, just as if you’ve said, “I bet you cannot change a car tire.” It’s amazing how many stumble and even if they do get it right, they’ll be too inebriated to call you on the bet.

Lastly, on the issue of Christmas, I want to rant about the omnipresence of the beastly “hi-vis” jacket. This piece of attire was once the near-exclusive preserve of those who toiled the night shift in construction or were law enforcement. Nowadays it seems every person in any capacity has the right to wear the canary yellow vest, and in so doing endows themselves with a certain amount of authority over the rest of us. 

Furthermore, accompanied by a clipboard and a lanyard around the neck, affixed with an official-looking ID card stating that the individual is a “Sustainability Compliance & Regulatory Officer” (or some such gobbledygook), I would bet that person could freely wander backstage at a Taylor Swift concert or get shockingly close to the Oval Office.

Having said that, at his time of year, there is one individual who definitely should wear a hi-vis jacket, but who gets away without having to do so. He’s an aged man who works among children, travels around built-up areas, exclusively in the hours of darkness, allegedly moving at terrific speeds, is powered by eight semi-controlled reindeer, and furthermore, it’s said that during the course of his one night’s duties he gets well and truly liquored up and on a sugar high from all the cookies, drinks and whatnot left for him. Of course I refer to Santa Claus. Someone please give that man a hi-vis vest for his protection.

Ho ho ho! Happy holidays to one and all.