View from a Rhino House: Black Friday for a golden Yule

It’s “Black Friday” & for those who are starting the long shopping-fest to Christmas this year, a jewelry store in downtown Tokyo has the perfect spending opportunity: a pure gold revolving “Christmas tree” covered in Disney characters including Mickey Mouse, Tinkerbell & Cinderella.

The tree is made of 40 kg of 24kt gold, standing about 2,5 metres high & just over 1,25 meters in diameter. It is decorated with pure gold-sheet silhouette cutouts of 50 popular Disney characters & draped with ribbons made of gold leaf. So a certain “sameness” in coloring, but perfect if you need to match a room filled with golden furniture & yellow walls……. & it’s a snip at around $4.000.000 (excluding sales taxes).

Not only a wonderful Christmas treat, the tree is actually a great investment, said the store’s marketing department. “Right now gold is over 4,400 yen per gram. We used pure gold & had an expert craftsman form each Disney character by hand,” she a spokeswoman, which took 10 craftsmen two months to complete.

The combination of gold & Disney characters had passers-by outside the store “mesmerized” (or “glazed-over with horror”, it depends on how you feel about spending $4.000.000 on an artificial tree).

“It is very vivid & the gold is very pretty,” said Takashi Miura, one of the jewelers who worked on this “masterpiece of good taste”. “The characters on it are also really cute & it really looks like a Christmas tree.” (So the money on making it wasn’t wasted then “It really looks like a gold Christmas tree covered in cute gold ornament”s – glad that’s cleared-up.)

Acknowledging the wave of austerity sweeping the world, the store offers a scaled-down version that features only 20 Disney characters & stands a mere 25 cm high for $243,000. (Don’t you hate it when you see crass commercialization of Christmas cheapened like this, either “big-up & pay the rate” or go home & cower in shame in your gold & yellow studio.)

While nobody has yet made a down payment on the larger tree, the miniature has already found buyers, the store reported.

“OK, it doesn’t look that much like a real tree anyway, it’s going round-&-round, & the color is a bit of a giveaway, but it will make a great conversation piece over Christmas dinner.”