One Utah

The holiday season is almost upon us.  Most retailers seem to have controlled themselves at least marginally and haven’t put their Christmas decorations up yet.  Thank heavens for small favors.

Unfortunately, with Thanksgiving a few days away, we now face the joyless death march of consumerism known as December.

I come from a long line of people who love Christmas.  My grandparents’ decorated almost immediately after Thanksgiving - they had lighted Santa and Mrs. Santa, reindeer, lights all over the house and indoors my Grandmother did a complete redecoration.  My sister’s house looks like something out of a sitcom - lights, sleighs, deer, Santas, multiple trees (I believe last year they had 9 trees in the house).  My parents house is an orgy of Christmas-y lights, images, and sounds.  So my detestation for the Holiday season is inexplicable. 

As Thanksgiving fades - and the last of the turkey is eaten - I dread the public spaces of our society.  I hate the endlessly upbeat music blaring everywhere, demanding that I have a “holly, jolly Christmas,” or informing me that some bland crooner is “dreaming of a white Christmas.”  The demands for jollity and cheerfulness are blandly generic and depressingly oppressive.  An endless array of commercials enticing consumerism blare from TV sets, radios, print media and the internet.  If only you buy the correct product, your family and friends will be happy and love you.  If only you get the right thing you and your family will be joyous.  Fix the right dinner, buy the right sweaters, drive the right car, own the right phone, play with the right toys.

December is a joyless, death march of consumerism with only the faintest hope that it will eventually be over, but forever darkened by the realization that a year from now it will start over.

I hate the holiday season for the message it sends that purchasing products is the path to happiness.  For the poor among us, it is a painful reminder that they lack financial resources.  For the more affluent, it is an opportunity to acquire goods we do not need.  The mismatch between proclaimed values and actions at the holiday season is too stark.  People will loudly proclaim the holidays are about family, then worry about finding the right item for aforementioned family.  The homeless shelters and services for the poor are overrun with gifts during the Holiday season.  Then during July, they will face a crisis as they run short of resources.

I fully expect to hear a bunch of conservative whiny ass titty babies start crying about “War on Christmas” any any day now.  I have bad news for these idiots - Christmas as a religoius holiday was lost so long ago it’s not even worth wasting balloon juice on the topic.  Retailers won this war so thoroughly and so absolutely that Christmas hasn’t been a religious holiday for at least a century.  And let’s face it, the difference between “Happy Holidays” and “Merry Christmas” is so completely trivial you should be embarrassed to even mention it; if you have time to worry about it, you have too much time on your hands.

In some sense, I’m jealous of the bobbleheads who yap about the War on Christmas.  They obviously have some utopian image of Christmas in their heads and cling to it with passionate fervor.  I just want it over and done with.  I don’t dream of a dystopian, idealized Christmas of the past with happy scenes of familial unity, piles of presents and bountiful tables - instead, I yearn for a remade holiday season in which purchasing of goods and services is forgotten.  I would love to see Christmas as a time for Christians to commit themselves to the hard work of social justice - to serving the poor, the needy, the downtrodden, to housing the homeless, comforting the afflicted, mourning with the grief-stricken and tending the ill.  I would love to see a world in which once a year we as individuals and as communities and as a nation commit ourselves not to giving and getting of things, but to the giving of our time, energy, resources, and selves.  Martin Luther King once said that it is only in serving others that we truly find ourselves.

That pipe dream will never come true.  So I’m left with a world in which everything is marketed to within an inch of its life and December is a wasteland of consumption, purchasing, and profits.

This entry was posted Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 11:03 am and is filed under Religion, Religious Fundamentalism, Society, This Blog. Both comments and pings are currently closed.