Christmas Time Is Here

Before I step onto the soapbox waiting in front of me, I feel that I ought to make a confession. Over the years, especially the past five or six, I’ve heard a great deal of grumbling from various people in my life about the crass commercialism that has taken over Christmas and sucked nearly all, if not entirely all, the deeper meaning and religious significance out of it, leaving it a gaudy, hollow shell of what it ought to be. And while I could see the point these people were making and even intellectually agree to a certain extent, there was still a large part of me that didn’t care and was quite happy to be caught up in every last cloying aspect of Christmas, from a profusion of decorations in my house to a near constant stream of Christmas music in my car. Part of this was due to the fact that I led a Christmas-deprived childhood (a story for another time), which meant that I had a tendency to over-indulge once I was free of those restrictions, much in the way that I ate a ridiculous amount of Fruit Loops my first year of college (they were in huge dispenser bins! available at any hour!) having been deprived of sugar cereals throughout my formative years. Another part of it was that my mother loved Christmas, and continuing some of the traditions she began in the years before she died helped me feel connected to her. And, finally, I suspect that a small part of my enthusiasm and willingness to overlook any flaws in the way mainstream America approached Christmas stemmed from the fact that I am, deep down, kind of a cheesy sentimentalist.

That said, there is something different about this year. I don’t know if it’s because things have actually changed externally or whether the change is internal, or some kind of mixture of both, but I’m finding the onslaught of this year’s Christmas season somewhere between irritating and distressing. It started in a Target parking lot about a week and a half ago, when a humongous black SUV decked out in Christmas decals and sporting a wreath on the front grill and bells hanging from the back bumper pulled up next to me as I was getting out of my car. Shaking my head over this, I walked into the store and was immediately assaulted by a profusion of Christmas decorations, displays, and music. And this was a full week before Thanksgiving, which caused me all sorts of holiday confusion. I love Christmas and get as excited about it as the next person, but honestly, CALM DOWN, AMERICA! Let’s enjoy Thanksgiving and some fall leaves and plastic cornucopias at least until the actual day is over!

I think what has disturbed me the most, however, is the rampant and strident bombardment of store advertisements. Because of some issues with my satellite receiver/DVR, I was without television for a good week prior to Thanksgiving, and since I have apparently become Mildred in Fahrenheit 451 and can’t go for more than a couple days without my “family,” I ended up watching a few episodes of the shows I follow online. This venue forces one to watch short commercials interspersed throughout the shows, and one such set I had to suffer through was a spate of ads for Target. I am not trying to single out Target—I love Target!—but these ads featured a certifiably insane blond woman frenetically prepping for the Black Friday sale in all sorts of wacky ways, including jogging down her neighborhood street with a fully loaded shopping cart. As she proclaimed wild-eyed to the camera, “I haven’t slept in days!” So not only are the advertisers openly admitting that such rabid consumerism is crazy, but they’re using said craziness to promote and encourage that type of behavior in the rest of us. As in, ha ha! Aren’t people nuts? And don’t you want to be that way too? Because who wouldn’t want to wreck their health and sanity for the best deals ever?

Even while recognizing the wrongness of this, I’ve still had to fight not to get sucked into the undertow. I get as easily overloaded by sensory input as a four-year-old (a trip to Costco drains me), and the idea of shopping in a store during the wee hours of the morning with hundreds of other aggressive shoppers sounds like one of Dante’s circles of hell to me. And yet with all the coupons and advertisements I’ve been getting in the mail and seeing on TV (now that it’s working again), I feel an almost primal urge—I must go shopping! I must take advantage of these deals! I must not miss out! And it’s not limited to Black Friday. Now there’s Cyber Monday, and about fifty e-mails in my Inbox offering me free shipping and 20% off for a limited time only. Hurry! Hurry! Don’t miss out! I ended up wasting an hour online last night (an hour I’ll never get back) looking at all kinds of products I don’t need and would never buy for anyone else just because I felt like I had to buy something. Fortunately, I awoke from this fevered state before I could actually put something in my cyber-cart and check out, wasting money and sucking on the sour taste of regret.

This issue may be old news to some people, but this is the first year it’s bothered me to the point of interfering with my enjoyment of the season. As I said earlier, maybe it’s an internal shift. But I think it also has to do with what’s been happening in the economy—which is very connected to what’s happening in the culture—and the fact that all this aggressive push to consume, consume, consume feels so out of synch with reality. Economic hardship is just that—hardship—and I’m not trying to gloss over the true suffering that people are experiencing as a result of the downturn in the economy. But hardship also offers opportunity to reflect, re-evaluate, and re-prioritize in ways that can bring a kind of health and clarity that times of plenty can blunt or distort. We’ve been given (whether we like it or not) this opportunity along with the option to simplify, pare things down to what really matters, and thus deepen the meaning and significance of what we do, what we give, and what we are given. But instead, it’s business as usual or even business MORE than usual, as the news gleefully crows (because the only thing that matters is economic growth, after all). Instead of reflection and thoughtfulness, we have frenzy. Or so it seems. I am doing my best to say no to that, to shut out the loud shouts of the advertisers, and hopefully others are too. I’m still going to put up my decorations and play my corny CDs. But I’m going to do my best to delete those e-mails, throw away those flyers and coupons, and avoid buying anything I don’t have a very good reason to buy in the coming month. Because contrary to what I’m being told, I have more than enough.