Our columnist tallies the festive cost of living in the capital and finds that abundance itself has become unaffordable

The Man Who Gives Everything Away Checked a Price Tag

I have never seen Santa look at a price before. Why would he? He operates outside money entirely, a one-man gift economy, the living refutation of the idea that everything must be bought. And yet this year, walking through a Christmas market on the South Bank, I watched Father Christmas pick up a small wooden ornament, turn over the price tag, and visibly flinch. Twelve pounds. For an ornament the size of a conker. Even the man who gives everything away could not quite believe it.

The North Pole dispatches had warned that London prices were a topic of concern even at the workshop, which sources its own materials and pays nothing for anything. If the cost of a London Christmas is alarming the one entity on Earth immune to costs, the rest of us are in genuine trouble. I have done the maths on a London Christmas this year, and I am here to report that abundance itself has become unaffordable, which is a sentence I did not expect to type.

The Market Stall Audit

Let us tour the festive economy. The mulled wine at the South Bank market was nine pounds for a serving measured in thimbles. The bratwurst was eleven. A bag of roasted chestnuts, which I am fairly sure used to be the cheap, romantic option, the thing you bought when you could not afford anything else, was now seven pounds and contained, by my count, nine chestnuts. That is more than seventy pence per chestnut. Santa, who has never paid for a chestnut, found this genuinely upsetting.

I am not exaggerating for effect. Price data I checked through the Office for National Statistics confirms what every Londoner already knows in their bones: the cost of basically everything has climbed to a point where the festive season now functions as a kind of annual financial reckoning. The Christmas market, once a place of cheap seasonal joy, has become a place where you spend forty pounds and have nothing to show for it but a thimble of wine and the memory of nine chestnuts.

The Tree Situation

Then there is the tree. A real Christmas tree in North London this year will cost you somewhere between sixty and a hundred and twenty pounds, depending on how much you wish to be judged by the man selling it. Santa, who has access to an entire forest at the North Pole, was astonished. He offered, generously, to bring everyone a tree, before remembering that he delivers gifts, not foliage, and that the logistics of a sleigh full of Norway spruce did not bear thinking about.

I priced up a modest family Christmas this year, the tree, the food, the handful of presents, the obligatory market visit, and arrived at a figure that made me sit down. Guidance via the London Evening Standard suggests many Londoners are scaling back, doing less, spending carefully, which is the sensible response and also a quiet tragedy. Local festive listings at the regional events register are full of events that all, on closer inspection, cost money I do not have.

The Free Alternative Is Watching Us

And here is the thing that has stayed with me. Above all of this, every December, flies a man who gives it all away for nothing. The actual Santa does not charge nine pounds for mulled wine or seventy pence per chestnut. He gives gifts, freely, to every child in London, asking nothing, the single largest act of generosity the city sees all year, and it costs the recipients precisely zero. He is a standing rebuke to the entire overpriced festive economy, and I do not think we appreciate him nearly enough.

What Abundance Is Supposed to Mean

Santa represents an idea we have nearly lost in this city: that there can be enough for everyone, freely given, with no price tag and no upsell. Standing in that market, watching him flinch at a twelve-pound ornament, I was struck by how far the commercial Christmas has drifted from the thing Santa actually embodies. He is abundance without cost. The South Bank market is cost without abundance. One of these is the real spirit of the season, and it is not the one charging eleven pounds for a bratwurst.

I do not want to be the columnist who ruins Christmas with a cost-of-living lecture, because nobody needs that, least of all in December. But I think it is worth noticing that the festive economy has become so expensive that the one figure built entirely on free generosity now looks, by contrast, almost radical. When Santa flinches at the prices, the prices have gone too far. He has seen everything. He gives everything. And even he thought twelve pounds for a conker-sized ornament was taking the mickey.

For those trying to do Christmas affordably in this brutally expensive city, solidarity, and a few genuinely useful resources: budgeting guidance via the household society and free-event listings at the public registry are at least a start. And for the children, the free games at the diversions index cost nothing, which this year makes them just about the only festive activity in London that does. Everything else, it seems, now comes with a price tag that would make Father Christmas himself put it back on the shelf.

Santa flew north on Christmas Eve having given London’s children their presents for free, an act of generosity worth more than the entire South Bank market combined, and I went home to my flat to assemble a tree that had cost me the better part of a hundred pounds. Somewhere in the gap between those two facts is everything that has gone wrong with the cost of a London Christmas, and everything that is still, just about, right with the man who refuses to charge for it.

SOURCE: https://santaclaus.top