What will you be giving and getting next December? Our intrepid reporter braves the annual gift fair in Harrowgate for a preview of the gadgets and geegaws heading this way, writes Louise East
THERE IS AN OLD JOKE I particularly like which goes something like this: Darth Vader goes up to Luke Skywalker and says, "Luke, I know what you're getting for Christmas." Luke, puzzled and a little exasperated, replies, "But how?" and Darth smugly announces: "I've felt your presents." I've always liked knowing what gifts people are getting before they do. Moments before friends hand birthday presents to other friends, I make them tell me what's inside. If I could hack into online wedding registers, I would. So I was very keen on the idea of visiting a Christmas gift fair, even if it was July.
Trade fairs are where the UK and Ireland's gift shops buy the stuff we will exchange in December. After going to one, I would be the Darth Vader of the festive season on a massive scale. I'd know what all of you are getting for Christmas.
Home and Gift Harrogate is not the UK's largest gift fair; that title goes to Birmingham's Spring Fair, which takes place each February. Instead, the Harrogate fair rather sweetly bills itself as "the industry's favourite annual show" and amongst exhibitors, there genuinely does seem to be a fondness for the fair, a feeling that while it might miss out on the tiara and sash, it would certainly win a Miss Congeniality award.
To the average punter, Home and Gift Harrogate is still bewilderingly, disorientingly vast: over 900 exhibitors offering hundreds of thousands of products. Amongst them, somewhere, is the gift industry's Holy Grail: the item which grabs the gift-buying imagination and squeezes it until the euro fly like popped corn.
Last year, that gift was Racing Grannies, a set of two wind-up geriatrics with grim jaws and half-moon glasses who race for the edge of the coffee table on tiny plastic zimmer-frames. They're the brain child of Bluw, a young self-styled "ideas factory" from London who last year sold half a million sets of Racing Grannies in the UK alone. At the Bluw stand, customer relations manager, Australian Linda Corrie talks me through her company's response to their Racing Grannies success: Fighting Granddads, Boxing Nuns and this year's invention, the Chicken and Egg. One wind-up takes the shape of a comedy chicken, the other an egg in sneakers; this Christmas, families all over Britain and Ireland can decisively settle which came first.
Elsewhere on the Bluw stand, there's a plastic taxi meter called Dad's Cab, which will keep track of all those trips to Dundrum Shopping Centre; tea mugs in the shape of Martini glasses; Margaret Thatcher nutcrackers (insert nut between her thighs) and an inflatable duck the size of a cow.
"We only blew up its head because it would be too big for the stand," says Corrie, looking at the pile of yellow PVC bemusedly. "This country," she says, "is obsessed with rubber ducks."
Down the aisle, Grant Watson, taciturn proprietor of House of Puzzles, has also struck gold with his third annual collectors' edition Christmas jigsaw made of Christmas-shaped pieces - holly, doves, snowmen and a strange cudgel-shaped object intended, I think, to be a cracker. Watson will ship between 15,000 and 20,000 this year. Here among the inflatable goal-posts and animated scenes of Bali (with "real" moving sea) Watson's jigsaws cut an old-fashioned, even forlorn figure, but he assures me that business is booming. "We're the biggest manufacturer of jigsaws in the UK. Mind you, there's only two of us, but still."
He takes me to one end of his stand to show me the company's best-selling jigsaw in Ireland. Called "The Grey Fergie", it is an unprepossessing affair - strips of grey sky and buff hedge with nothing in it but an old tractor. "That should make a terrible jigsaw. Everything's the same colour. Dreadful," Watson says. "But those old tractors have a massive grip on the imagination." He gestures to several more tractor-centric jigsaws, all best-sellers and purses his lips disapprovingly. "I come from a farming background and I have to tell you, I hate the bloody things."
In a quieter part of the hall, David Walsh is selling Winesoap; rustic-looking bars of soap made from the lees left over from wine production. Last year, David travelled to Australia to visit a step-brother he had not seen in 25 years. The re-discovered brother made wine, his daughter made soap and buoyed-up with family feeling, David offered to sell it in the UK. Is it doing well? "I'd say it's doing alright," he says, shrugging amiably. "We'd sell more if I worked harder."
Several sections of the fair are devoted entirely to Christmas itself; you know you're approaching one when you are knocked sidewise by the smell of synthetic cinnamon. After examining several stands, I realise that Christmas has changed clothes since I was a child.
Back then, Christmas dressed like a devotee of Studio 54 in its declining years - tinsel, lametta, red, green 'n' gold baubles. Now the disco years are over and the festive season looks a lot like Laura Ingalls Wilder. Stand after stand offers nothing but gingham bows, pine-cone wreaths, gingerbread men wearing tiny felt Santa hats and festoons of celluloid popcorn.
Andrew Singer from Banbridge, Co Down has built a sizeable business out this new down-home version of Christmas. His company, Enchanté's stand is one of the largest in the fair, and it is like walking into Santa's grotto if Santa lived in Boston and had a penchant for handicrafts. "Everything is very retro now," he says. "There's an American country feel to Christmas, very traditional, very rustic, very primitive."
Singer is an earnest, even solemn man who takes Christmas very seriously indeed. Enchante's tag-line is "From the middle of the mountains of the Kingdom of Mourne" and Singer says his 2,500 stockists worldwide (he has several hundred customers in Ireland alone) particularly like that his products are hand-made in Ireland. So does he ever get sick of Christmas? "Never. I love it," he says fervently. "I live and breathe Christmas."
Across the board, interiors are moving away from the mass-produced and towards what Juliet Warkentin, one of the world's leading trend predictors, terms "curated". What that means is that even if an object is made in its millions, it needs to look battered, hand-crafted, artisan and that most misused of words, "authentic".
Given that humanity is threatened with extinction by everything from global warming to mortgage payments, the desire to crawl back into a gingham-upholstered womb is not surprising, but after my trip to Home and Gift Harrogate, I feel responsibility for the outbreak of homespun chic may rest squarely at the feet of one woman and one woman alone: Gisela Graham.
Graham is a German Martha Stewart who started designing knick-knacks 30 years ago, and soon took her home country's folksy take on Christmas worldwide. The Gisela Graham stand at Harrogate is the size of a small house and is staffed by a fleet of scarily efficient and focused women who talk me through the new Christmas ranges (17 per year) as though introducing new members of the UN Security Council.
"Winter Fairies is this year's best-seller. Everybody else is doing gold. Gisela's doing white. This is Turtle Dove in which Gisela re-invented gold by adding champagne. Customers can mix it with olive and chocolate."
The Gisela Graham stand is charm incarnate, all painted dolls and tiny toy-boxes overflowing with polka-dot presents, but I reel away from it in the grip of a strange, free-floating anxiety.
In truth, Home and Gift Harrogate is more consumerism than I can take. Everywhere, there is stuff, stuff and more stuff, most of it characterised by its complete and utter uselessness.
China figurines in the shape of anorexic flapper-girls, breed-specific dog keyrings, five-foot vases of flowers constructed from nylon and sequins, dream-catchers the size of hub-caps, painted with scenes from Native American life, "Boob Pasta" TM, soap in the shape of a dolphin, soap in the shape of a hand grenade, soap in the shape of an old-fashioned bar of soap, and hundreds, thousands, millions of scented candles.
I pause a moment in front of a large glass case of snow globes of quite astonishing ugliness. Each globe rests on a ceramic stand suitable to its contents - the bottom half of a sheep for a globe full of floating lambs, a severed piano for a jazz music tableau.
"Aren't they amazing?" a chirpy saleswoman asks. I agree, rather ambiguously, that they are.
"They're totally unique because they have an inbuilt blower," she enthuses. "You don't even have to shake them." I didn't come here to sneer but the thought of a world inhabited by people too lazy and disenchanted to shake a snow globe makes me long to move to Co Leitrim with a copy of Thoreau's Walden. Several exhibitors refer nervously to the credit crunch (sales are definitely down this year), but a more pressing question is whether manufacturing glow-in-the-dark rubber duckies is a suitable use for the last few drops in the global oil tank.
By three o'clock, I am as ill-tempered and petulant as Verruca Salt. I need to leave in order to catch my train, but I find it strangely hard to leave. Everything has started to blur into one - scented candles, pine-cone wreaths, gingham bows, pine-scented gingham-wreathed candles - and still I forge on. A woman in bleached denim chews her cuticles and says, in a voice taut with rage: "You work your fingers to the bone with a quality product and then some crap comes along and blows you out of the water."
I realise I am searching for just one last thing. The über-gift, the present to end all presents, the final piece of crap that means I need never look at another gift shop in my life. I am looking for an inoculation and finally I find it. One foot high, constructed from low-grade plastic and retailing at £5.99, it's a life-like replica of Karl Marx's Das Kapital rendered as a money-box.
It is time for me to leave.