Some of you will think I’m a bit slow on the uptake, but it only just occurred to me for the first time that Christmas ornamentation is an art form.

I was spurred to this bit of enlightenment with the help of a striking photo spread on the front page of the Sunday Gazette’s Real Estate section, which showed 16 Stockade doorways that were tastefully decorated with wreaths, greenery and ribbons in very nicely done photos by staff photographer Marc Schultz (check ’em out here).

Another staffer, features writer Jeff Wilkin, unwittingly brought this concept into focus for me by having a house party (his annual), at which I was enchanted by an excess of festive decorations, some of them consisting of creatively illuminated objects not normally associated with the holidays, but mostly comprising miniature evergreen trees and a whole heck of a lot of candles.

As a sort of disclaimer, I should tell you that I was raised in a Jewish household with no Christmas stuff in it at all, so my roughly 50 years of cluelessness do have a basis. Still, I’m not sure how I managed to miss the clearly self-expressive nature of the Christian world’s annual immersion in red and green, or the distinctly aesthetic characteristics it shares with many forms of visual art.

What really gets me thinking is when I consider that, for a great many Americans, the closest they come to visual art in their daily lives is through studio photographs of the family hanging in the stairway and perhaps a couple of “good pictures” (by which I mean an etching or lithograph of some recognizable scene, possibly in Europe) in the living room, or maybe even just the tattoos on their skin.

But then comes Christmas, with the homemade ornaments and the elaborate wrapping and the Nativity scenes, and all of a sudden everybody’s house is a hotbed of visual expression.

This is sort of an obsession with me — the fact that most of us live without any real art in our homes, and that most of us seem to have no idea that we’re missing anything by it.

Whenever I go to someone’s house for the first time, it’s all I can do to pay attention to the introductions and niceties, because all I really want to do is run from room to room and look at the art. Yeah, I like to look at what’s on the bookshelves, too, and maybe check out the furniture, the electronics and so on. But what I can’t resist is the urge to take a close look at whatever is on the walls.
But in most homes — including some very, very expensive ones — I am left disappointed. Not by the mediocre quality of the art, no no no . . . by the TOTAL lack of it. There will be fine fabrics and rare woods on the furniture, plush carpets, fancy wallpaper — and no art. To me, this is akin to a kitchen without food, or an entertainment center with no music or movies.

It’s real deprivation.
But at Christmastime, even in those sterile environments, things loosen up and get creative. They get decorative. They get messy. And that feels much better.

Now don’t jump to conclusions and start thinking this includes those over-the-top outdoor displays. Sure, they’re fun to cruise on a frosty night, and the lights can be enchanting — but inflatable plastic snow globes and all that are nothing but pure kitsch. And despite the rather robust position of kitsch in contemporary art (take Jeff Koons, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman as examples), I’m not endorsing this sort of bad taste as a valid aesthetic experience.

Manufactured commercialism can never be art as far as I’m concerned, and making fun of it, or turning it into pricey International Art Fair junk does nothing to elevate anybody. Call me an old fool, but I’ll take sincerity in the form of a pretty bow any day over that cynical stuff.

And, yes, I did just say that Cindy Sherman is kitsch. For those who want to be sticklers, I’ll change that to camp, based on this definition:

Kitsch is bad taste. Camp is kitsch that knows it. And Cindy is too smart not to know it.

Happy Holidays!