Christmas in Singapore – High Voltage!
The Xmas decor is up, and the main shopping districts are having their annual contest to see which one wins the prize. We live nowhere near Orchard Road or the Esplanade, where the main shopping action is, but our local mall has expanded and become one of the biggest in Singapore, and is amazingly full of people, even a year after the expansion and after the opening of several other big shopping centers in this shopping-saturated city. Here’s a sample of the decoration outside the mall entrance:
The holiday element we particularly like about this is the Danger: High Voltage sign. There are several of them in this display: one on each of these fabric-laden lamps, and a couple on the tree itself. They look like gift tags from a distance.
This is the happy insouciance of Singapore: your Christmas display poses a danger to the public, so what do you do? Do you reconfigure the lighting and extension cords so that the danger is eliminated? No. Do you restrict access to the display, so that curious fingers don’t have a chance to touch it and get electrocuted? No. Do you protect your legal liability by putting little “Danger” signs on your Christmas display? YES!!!! Does this at all affect the festive spirit of the display? I leave that to you, gentle reader.
Score: legal butt-protection 1, artistic integrity 0