December 18, 1991

FOR that holiday spirit, this may be the year for beer. With Champagne prices through the roof (and eggnog full of fat), beer certainly suits leaner times. But not just any beer. And certainly not an ordinary six-pack of something industrial -- suitable when your team has won, perhaps, but not for Yuletide toasting. For the holidays, there are other, more appropriate choices: the seasonal Christmas brews. If you consider the special Christmas bottles of Coca-Cola, the special Christmas blend from Starbuck's Coffee -- even the Christmas brandy made by Germain-Robin in California -- it makes sense that brewers are also cashing in on Christmas.

Executing an abrupt about-face in response to dismal polls and bad economic news, the White House today abandoned its effort to persuade voters that the economy was recovering and acknowledged that "for all practical purposes, the recession continues." White House officials said the political reversal was driven by Samuel K. Skinner, President Bush's new chief of staff, who has moved quickly in his first two days on the job to forge a new public relations strategy intended to stop Mr. Bush's political slide as the 1992 Presidential campaign begins.

When the CIBA-Geigy Corporation came out with a new arthritis drug two years ago, it filled medical journals with advertisements, hired Mickey Mantle with his arthritic knees as a spokesman and deployed representatives across the nation to leave free samples of the drug, Voltaren, in hospital doctors' lounges. But at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the campaign fell flat. The hospital's pharmacy committee decided that older, less expensive drugs were just as effective. The hospital's pharmacy would not stock Voltaren, the committee decreed, and its doctors should not use it. The hospital prohibited company representatives from promoting the drug on hospital premises or even mentioning it.

Will Marvel Entertainment Group's shareholder reports become collector's items? Yesterday, the comic book publisher released its first quarterly report since Marvel became a public company in July. The report came out in the form of a four-page comic book, with Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, two of the company's comic characters, bragging to each other about just how wonderful a quarter it was.

The Avenue of Eternal Peace, the main road through the capital, ends at the gate to one of the country's gargantuan state enterprises, a steel factory that employs 186,000 workers and sprawls from the edge of the city into the mountains and plains beyond. It takes half an hour by train to go from one end to the other of the central factory of the Capital Iron and Steel Mill, where giant blast furnaces run 24 hours a day. Along the way, the main path splinters into the different parts of this mini-society: a park, a flower garden with a small zoo, a hospital, two colleges, a nursery, a kindergarten, and a farm that grows fish, poultry and vegetables for the factory workers.