What Religion Is Black Friday?

At first, I was just slightly offended by all the Christmas trees in Singapore. I had departed from Rome Christmas night and, after twelve hours in the air, arrived in Singapore the next day. East Asia ought to have meant Buddhism and Fu lions, I thought, wats and acupuncture. Instead, here I was on the tip of the Malay Peninsula, the evening air sticky as spilt eggnog, and in front of me row upon row of perfectly conical plastic evergreens decked in golden stars and silver bulbs ringed the bay like a glitzy tree farm.

My first thought: cultural imperialism! Europe and Christianity imposing on yet another ancient and noble culture. The thought came and went, as insubstantial as the twinkle lights on the glossy bay. It rang false even as I formulated it, but it came just the same. At a check-up as a kid, I remember the doctor once dinging me in the knee with the mini rubber hammer, but not in quite the right spot to produce the reflex jerk; I gave a vigorous kick anyway because I knew that was what I was supposed to do. The thought was like that – a false knee-jerk.

Following the arc of the shore, I found myself walking through trellises of electric icicles toward Marina Bay Sands – the six-billion-dollar hotel-cum-casino presiding over the city’s entrance, its three towers meant to evoke shuffling playing cards, its iconic SkyPark resting like a deftly balanced cruise ship across all three. On the bay, strobes and lasers and water spouts began to emanate from the Sands, a nightly show called “Spectra,” a name that might as easily fit a James Bond villain or a line of futuristic beauty products.

It was all quite marvelous, but a proclamation of the Christian West it was not. I was a world away from Rome.

Singapore’s Christmas trees got me thinking about holidays. My visit had begun with the odd experience of traveling on Christmas Day. Airports are always rather placeless places, populated by people going somewhere else; now I realized how timeless such transport hubs are too. Not only are half the people there living in a different time zone, but nothing sets holidays apart except the length of lines. The same can’t be said of Rome, where I live and teach. Italy’s capital – at least its historic center – may today be more tourist city than Italian, but when in Rome, one definitely knows where one is.

A Christmas tree stands amidst religious statues, Singapore, 2018. Rainer Krack / Alamy Stock Photo.

Even so, when it comes to holidays, the Eternal City has experienced an outbreak of invasive species. The priest Valentine was Roman but, since his martyrdom in the third century, had never been more than a second-tier saint in a city that claims, among others, Peter and Paul. But today, by late January, store windows begin to crowd with frilly hearts and sales in his name. In autumn, cartoonish ghouls pop up across southern Europe, where Halloween has no historic roots. Yet the holiday that outshines all other imports is Black Friday. Advertisements begin months in advance. No one knows a thing about Black Friday’s origin, but no one seems to care. Black Friday – its name left untranslated – is accepted like the others. To those who will listen, I explain that Black Friday is not a holiday at all, that it is pure advertising gimmick, the product of a long weekend and a genuine holiday that always falls on Thursday. As an American, I’m not sure whether to be embarrassed or offended, since we have a splendid and relatively uncommercialized holiday just the day before that expresses the best in American civic instincts. What could be more wholesome than giving thanks? And what do Europeans import? The parasite without the host, consumption without gratitude.

Over the next few days of my extended stopover, Singapore’s abundant Christmas decorations became a source of fascination. They seemed to have cost a lot, for one thing. A cone rocketing upward in a skyscraper’s atrium was covered so thoroughly with blue and gold bulbs that only the shape of a tree remained. Piles of gift boxes large enough to fit a child inside formed a thick barrier around it. In Gardens by the Bay – the city’s fantastical answer to Central Park – a statue of a bull wore Santa hats on each of its horns and a garland of bells around its neck. The park seemed to have been the site of an enormous Christmas party days before; I passed silent concession booths covered in bows and wrapping paper, rows of abandoned picnic tables, and an expanse of artificial turf studded with candy canes. In the middle stood a candy-covered chateau, now eerily empty. In Singapore, where spitting on the sidewalk carries a hefty fine, even the detritus of a holiday bash is unsettlingly neat.

The elvish ghost town in Gardens by the Bay also maintained a distinctly Asian flare. For starters, it was nestled in the park’s trademark forest of metallic trees, their spiderweb canopies a vibrant fuchsia by day, alive with changing colors at night. And then there were the rabbits. Everywhere, giant plastic rabbits – dancing, skipping, bounding – toting carrots and pumpkins and baskets of anonymous vegetables, cuddling hearts adorned with Chinese characters. 2023 was the Year of the Rabbit in the Chinese calendar, so rabbits supplanted reindeer. Some features of the Singaporean aesthetic – a giant aluminum baby suddenly floating in mid-summersault above a grassy knoll – remained incomprehensible to me, but the ensemble was arresting.

It was not, however, in any discernible way, Christian. As I mulled my reflex reaction to the faux conifers and icicles the night before, I wondered if what had seemed at first blush the invasion of Western culture contained any inkling of the religion that had made the West. If I had not already known that Christmas marked the birth of Jesus, I asked myself, was there anything in the thousands of dollars of lights and garlands festooning Singapore that might have hinted at its origins? Not in the skyscraper’s atrium, where Mariah Carey sang “All I Want for Christmas Is You” on a loop. Nor did the bunnies in the park, with their hearts and candy canes, get me beyond Generic Holiday.

Not even a stop at the city’s most prominent church would have helped me deduce the origins of Christmas. To be fair, Saint Andrew’s Cathedral was undergoing renovation, and I stumbled upon it accidentally. From across the bay my eyes had fixed on what had seemed an architectural oddity, a turquoise tower smaller than the city’s skyscrapers but rendered exotic in appearance by its color and a boxy shape. I imagined an eccentric millionaire building a ziggurat in art deco style. When I got closer, I realized that the ziggurat was just colorful scaffolding; somewhere underneath was a steeple. Message boards outside assured me that all were welcome, but they didn’t indicate what was being celebrated or why one might want to venture in.

This is not to say that Singapore is an irreligious nation. Later in the day at a neighborhood food court, I struck up a conversation over tea with a white-bearded man, whose wizened features and jaunty teeth suggest the Old Man and the Sea more than Santa. Affably, he showed me pictures of his recently married son and identified himself as the caretaker of the local mosque. He estimated that three in ten Singaporeans could be considered “very observant” if one included all religions. Ethnically, Singapore is quite mixed; I was staying in a neighborhood on the edge of Chinatown and spent the next day meandering through the bustling side streets and pungent aromas of Little India and past a grand onion-domed mosque off Arab Street. Singapore is a religious hodgepodge as well: a third Buddhist, about a fifth Christian, with others identifying as Muslim, Taoist, and Hindu. Another fifth professes no religion. My interlocutor hailed from Tamil Nadu on India’s southeast coast. He talked about the rewards and challenges of life in Singapore – no crime, but no retirement either, the family, not the state, providing the social safety net. This made a stable marriage for his son critical. The wedding photos that he showed me were unostentatious. Several times in the conversation, he returned to the importance of religion, an idea he associated especially with not going into debt or spending beyond one’s means.

Singaporean values often tend toward the consumeristic more than the transcendent. Singapore’s long-reigning first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, set the tone for the city’s rise from postwar poverty to manufacturing and financial powerhouse but declared, “Poetry is a luxury we cannot afford.” Today polls rank shopping and dining out as Singaporeans’ favorite pastimes. Author William Gibson infamously derided Singapore as “Disneyland with the Death Penalty,” but this seems unfair. The country’s early history was a scramble for survival. After a brutal occupation by the Japanese during World War II, Singapore declared independence from Britain in 1959, entering into the federation of former colonies that became Malaysia only to be expelled in 1965. Prime Minister Lee teared up on television as he announced the news; the tiny island with no natural resources had been left adrift to fend for itself. But Malaysia’s rebuff turned out to be a boon. Today Singapore’s per capita GDP is among the highest in the world, three and a half times that of its much larger neighbor, and the country has managed to forge its own multiethnic, multireligious identity. Lee ran a tight ship, tolerating neither litter nor corruption, punishing drug trafficking with execution. As far as it is possible today, Singapore calls to mind the ancient Greek ideal of the city-state; with little margin for error, its survival and success depends on a virtuous citizenry.

Squeaky clean, responsible, and pragmatic, Singapore looks benignly, even proudly, on its British past – unlike other former colonies that enjoyed less post-independence success. Everywhere one finds locales named “Raffles” after British lieutenant-governor Sir Stamford Raffles who acquired the island for the Crown in 1823. Raffles transformed an island of swampy fishing villages into a free trade port. The British laid out the grid, and scores of Malays, Indians, and Chinese filled it in; like the United States, Singapore owes much of its success to immigrant grit. The colony’s drift away from Britain after World War II had less to do with oppressive rule than the creaking empire’s inability to defend it from the Japanese – who arrived under the slogan “Asia for Asians.” Today Singapore’s downtown judders with construction as scores of multinational corporations relocate their Asian headquarters from Hong Kong, another former British outpost now setting a starkly different course under Chinese rule. Singapore’s government, meanwhile, has launched a campaign encouraging its people to improve their English grammar. My knee-jerk narrative of religious and cultural imperialism simply didn’t fit.

Unsurprisingly, the most spectacular Singaporean Christmas display was inside the Sands. The hotel sits atop a multistory shopping complex, all glass and steel curves and zigzagging escalators. The mall’s name, however – The Shoppes – might have been pilfered from an England in which God still rested merry gentlemen whilst good kings went about serving figgy pudding. A floor below and you’re in Venice – a tic-tac-toe board of canals lined with aqua-colored tiles, circumscribed by railings to prevent distracted shoppers from falling in. Luxury brands from A to Z – Armani, Bulgari, Chanel, Dior, Ermenegildo Zegna – had impressed me at first, but on further travels through Asia I realized that the same stores are everywhere, like KFC or McDonald’s except that they cost more and you’re still hungry when you leave. Even the eye-popping skyscrapers that house the high-end businesses – Shanghai Tower, Taipei 101, the Petronas Towers – become ho-hum after a while. Since the Sears Tower lost the designation of world’s tallest building in 1998, twenty-five buildings have surpassed it in height. Supertalls are now like Cartier jewels – expensive, yes, but something you can find anywhere along the Pacific Rim.

The Sands was responsible for the tree farm by the bay that I’d seen on my first night. Inside, the hotel had one-upped itself with a floating Christmas forest – the trees were literally suspended in the air between the escalators. Rising and descending between Venice and The Shoppes amid the rootless evergreens, I realized that I was witnessing a colonization of sorts – but it was not the imposition of Western or Christian values on the world. The West itself had been the first to fall to this new empire without realizing what had happened, leaving behind caricatures of itself and expensive retail chains. Political philosopher Patrick Deneen coined the term “anticulture” to describe this colonizing force – not a nation-state but the unspoken ideology of those currently running our nation-states – that drives global commerce and government, uprooting local traditions in order to sell us newer models of ourselves. Weaken the ties of family, faith, community, and culture, of the particularity that roots us in time and place, and nothing remains but homo economicus, whose only fixed identity is to consume. This global juggernaut is “defined by the capacity to transcend place, to transcend any particular time, to transcend nature. And to create a condition in which we are able to live the same everywhere: a homogenized, standardized monoculture.”

I thought again of the rabbits in Gardens by the Bay. With their pumpkins, hearts, and carrots, the rabbits could be hopped out to celebrate almost any holiday – from Easter to Halloween to International Carrot Day (April 4, if you’re wondering). I once asked a Spanish friend what he had against Halloween. He harrumphed for a while about how twisted one had to be to honor goblins or to dress one’s children up like devils. Then he added in a more sober tone, “It’s just that in our calendar, that time of year, there’s a gap between holidays. So companies needed to insert something to keep selling.” I think he’s right. One might still find the occasional Bible verse on a church message board in an American downtown, but during “the holidays” it’s mostly wrapping paper and shiny bulbs there, too. I saw no trace of Christ’s birth in Singapore because all our holidays have become Black Friday. My Pavlovian response to Christmas trees in Asia – the narrative of Western imperialism, impervious to fact or nuance – is the foundation myth of our global anticulture, the story that once cajoled the West into doubting what was best in itself and giving up what was most particular. We shrouded our cathedrals and built more Shoppes. We traded Bethlehem for beads.

Exiting the Sands, I paused to admire one last Christmas bauble, a snow globe twice my height, nestled among floating trees and gargantuan gold and silver gift boxes, stocking stuffers for a race of giants. Inside the globe were more empty gift boxes – and a model of the Sands.

Holidays mold cultures and express their aspirations. The Christian calendar – Christmas most especially – is among the faith’s boldest ventures, a bid to sanctify time itself, to bend the turning of the seasons to the worship of the Incarnate God. Standing in the Sands, shivering just a bit from the air conditioning while peering into that glass orb – crystal ball and world and knickknack all at once – I felt like I was gazing into Christmas Future, a monoholiday without manger or child, the snowy celebration of a globe with nothing inside but plastic figures of ourselves.