All I Want For Christmas
Reports during this holiday shopping season that packages are being stolen from stoops and porches raise a question: why buy Christmas presents, anyway? One might think that the beautiful music of the season would be present enough. Instead, O Holy Night and O Come All Ye Faithful are perennially relegated to the position of a neglected Cinderella scrubbing the hearth – beautiful and inspiring but slaving away in the Muzak, getting little if any recognition.
We know, of course, why mountains of Christmas presents are bought, many with credit cards already burdened with crushing balances. Stores need to sell half their inventory in December in order to open in January. Parents will feel like Scrooge if they don’t participate. Kids whose rooms are already bulging with forgotten toys and mistreated clothes will hate parents (or so think the parents) who don’t participate.
Then there are the more important reasons.
The U.S. economy’s vitality (what there is of it) became dependent on consumer spending ages ago. This Christmas the economy would prefer to see in its stocking multitudinous sales of huge televisions, medium-sized tablets and tiny phones (to replace those that their owners have had for a whole 13 months). But it won’t look askance at pink plastic puppies that end up under the trees tied down to the tops of cars on their way home in twilight during this newly chilly month of December. It all counts.
Unfortunately, consumers have also become psychically dependent on being consumers. Someone in antiquity invented the custom of gifts in late December and, by golly, we’re sticking with it. More stuff? Goody. I’d be less critical if a batch of homemade Christmas cookies got a more enthusiastic reception than a sweater emblazoned with snowflakes, but the former is likely to be received with the condescending spirit of “it’s the thought that counts.”
The way we spend our time has much to do with addiction to stuff. We are busy, but with things like time-consuming piano lessons for tone-deaf two-year-olds, Being busy with anything truly worth doing – like work that one enjoys -- makes a person feel good, not stressed. Things worth doing are defined by a curmudgeon like this writer as reading, writing, hiking, swimming, shed building, language learning (no more Chinese, please) and having dinner as a family. When your life is really satisfying, you don’t need the dubious joy of trying to find a place in the closet for superfluous clothing, games, gadgets and whatever replaced Chia Pets.
So what to do? Surely not to quit cold turkey, reducing merchants to tears and driving Black Friday shoppers to make fools of themselves in some way that didn’t involve breaking down plate glass doors. After all, the All Quiet in Walmart’s aisles might set off an economic chain reaction leading to failure of the inspiringly lengthy Stop & Shop truck to appear in the store parking lot. Being fond of food, I can’t have that.
Finding a solution (although I realize that few people see a problem) might begin with reading about Charlie Chaplin’s tale of his desolate life in a hideous orphanage, where children received gifts only on Christmas – an orange and some chocolates -- and Chaplin was deprived of even that one year as punishment for some pathetic little transgression. An orange and chocolates? Would that we all could receive (without the hateful orphanage conditions) such a gift at Christmas instead of all the junk that jeopardizes life and limb because of all the discarded packaging littering the sidewalks after Christmas.
Of course, that wouldn’t do much for the economy except for Hershey’s and the orange growers. But it might be nice just once. We could spare the lives of 100 million evergreen trees, hang up stockings, fill them with oranges and chocolates and just do what we do on Thanksgiving – eat.
Lest a reader condemn me for the cruelty of advocating that children face nothing on Christmas morning but a basket of fruit (will someone please give me one?), I want to say that my seasonal spirit, such as it is, does inspire me to entertain one genuine Christmas wish. I hope Rudolph will someday have some real friends, and not just the fickle bunch that eschewed him until he was looked upon with favor by the ultimate materialistic A-lister, Santa Claus.
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