I don't like the Christmas season. December is the most stressful month of the year, the good cheer is forced down our throats, suicide rates are at their highest, the music is tiresome and the money-bleed is shocking. The bathetic romance of family and friendship is in high gear, as if we must love and show our love more this month. It's a cheap collection of cheap emotions; and invariably some pompous columnist or sincere preacher or self-important relative will make the point that Christmas has become too materialistic.
Duh! Of course it's materialistic-materialism is society's primary religion. So primary, in fact, that the excessive spending in December is crucial to the economy. There are sectors of the economy wholly dependent on Christmas. For example, there is an annual tour of overpriced unnecessary kitsch, featuring clocks made from shellacked wood and chocolate covered cherries hand dipped by neo-hippies. These craft sales are held in convention centres and actually have cover charges, as if it were an entertainment, or a necessity.
Each one is crammed with people. Ordinary, hard-working middle-class folk, buying stocking stuffers, carefully choosing overwrought knitting designs they think their friends, relative, lovers and colleagues will accept as tokens of love and care. In return they will receive equally useless fare. This we call Christmas-eve or morning, the stuff of nostalgia, the warm glow of love. It begins with the madness of shopping for the perfect gift or, barring that, something nice or, barring that, something not too expensive that isn't ugly. But, we must get something, because it is Christmas and that is what it's all about. A significant portion of our annual budget is spent on this form of sharing our love.
At the end of the week, the month, the year, what most of us manage to accomplish most of all is work. We meet our deadlines; we collect our pay. And somehow what we do for that pay becomes who we are. Work defines us and the money we make sustains our self-definition. We are what we do and we are what we buy. And, to complete the equation, we are not whom we love or who loves us. So, each year, to end the year, we take the fruits of our labours (or more likely, the lines-of-credit those fruits have earned) and we make grand financial gestures of our love. We buy expensive unnecessary crap because we have to buy something.
I've tried over the past few years to stop gifting-Christmas, birthdays, etc.-in my family and the response has been fascinating. At first the suggestion was taken personally, as if I had insulted the gifts I had received in the previous years. (No such intention.) Then there were negotiations-gifts within nuclear groupings but not necessarily to extended family. Of course, all the deals fell apart, as everybody bought gifts for everybody else. I felt the pressure to buy overwhelming; to not buy was somehow to say I was destitute or, worse, to say I wasn't capable of love towards my own family. The one agreement I found most amusing was to make certain the kids did not go without. As if denying them a materialistic Santa would pierce their innocence.
Of course, we could send a cheque to PWS&D. But gifting doesn't have to be altruistic. Nor does it have to be store bought. I, like you, spend a whole year gifting myself-dvds, computer stuff, holidays, new clothes-I don't need anything. And I'm fully capable of getting stuff I want. But I never get tired of a perfect looking apple-just one. Or a cookie home baked; a muffin. Just one. Or, a bottle of wine. (More than one is fine.) I indulge and encourage the economy all year round. This month all I want to do is kick back, hang with those people I've ignored all year, have a drink, and think about that kid that was born in that barn so long ago. I want to do anything but have a merry materialism month.
