And So This Is ...

from Jacqueline

Reading the New York Times just after Thanksgiving, I had a quick scan through an item on the front page regarding predictions of it being a pretty tough holiday season this year. The US economy is held up by the Chinese, who aren’t exactly enamored of the good old dollar any more, houses are in foreclosure and the price of gas is going up and up, even if it does fall back every now and again. In the midst of this gloom, the general feeling was that many people would be passing by the high-end stores as they went about the spending of their money, and would instead be patronizing stores where they would get more bang for their buck. In fact, to start me off on a Sunday morning, one woman said, “I’m shopping at Target and Best Buy this year – it’s going to be a hard, hard Christmas.”

Hard, hard Christmas, thought I? Has this woman just lost the last marble in her head? Hard Christmas, when you can afford to go shopping at Target and Best Buy?

Something, somewhere is out of whack. Anyone reading the newspaper or viewing the latest on CNN will know what a hard holiday season is about.



My prickly response to this article was reignited a couple of days later when I was driving along listening to NPR. Robert Frank, author of Richistan: A Journey Through The American Wealth Boom and the lives of the New Rich, was being interviewed. He was giving examples of a mindset of wealth that is not new, but is definitely different from the wealth waves of the past. He recounted sitting on the 100ft yacht owned by a well-known jillionaire, and was asking him how he felt about his wealth. Turns out that this man did not consider himself wealthy, in fact, he thought he was verging on poor, and pointed to another yacht in the same marina – a 200ft gin palace (my words, couldn’t help it) that he coveted.

Something is waaaay out of whack here. And one of the problems is stuff. Most of us have got too much stuff. We expect even more stuff at holiday times, and we are breeding new generations addicted to stuff. And why are we all grabbing more stuff than we can possibly ever need? Arguably, it's to fill that great big hole somewhere inside that can’t be filled by all the money and stuff in the world.

It’s the hole inside kids who hardly see their parents, but have every new this, that and the other available to purchase. It’s the hole inside people who don’t have time for each other any more, racing against the clock, for the train, along the freeway. It’s the hole that began over a hundred years ago with the American dream of personal independence. Only we went too far.

And for the purposes of this post, I am not even going to touch the people who are making us feel less than worthy if we don’t have all that stuff.

A few years ago, I became quite sickened by the pre-holiday indulgence in shopping. I went out to buy some gifts and came back feeling a bit queasy, to tell you the truth. People, wide-eyed and manic-looking (and I know, any mall can do that to you), were just going round grabbing as much stuff as they could as if the world was going to run out of ... stuff. Men, women and children were going in and out of stores with as many plastic bags of more stuff than they could ever use or have reasonable sized closets to hold it all in. I felt as if I were witnessing a dreadful gorge-fest, and I went home, tired and sad.

No one received gifts that year. I sent cards, and in each card I included a letter informing my dear friends and family that, believe it or not, I had more stuff than I could possibly use already. The stuff I really needed was very specific, and I could buy it myself. I let them know that I had sent all my gift-buying money to four organizations as donations. And I said that if they really wanted to buy me a gift, send the money instead to a non-profit they believed in. That didn’t make me a saint – we all do what we can. I was just so sick of the spend, spend, spend culture of the festive season.

The holiday season has its roots in Saturnalia, the winter pagan festival that was really all about gratitude and hope. (Those clever marketing whizz-kids, the early Christians, moved the celebration of Jesus' birth to winter, to bring more pagans over to their side). The festive foods of today still reflect that ritual: Sweets and puddings made of dried summer fruits are a reminder of a bountiful harvest and the sweetness of life. The evergreen Christmas trees and yule log were worshipped and signified everlasting life, and big fires were lit to give strength to the sun, for it was at the heart of life.



So, what is at the heart of life, and how can we celebrate it by not going crazy at Target or even – for those who can afford it – Neiman Marcus this year? How can we spread the festive season around a bit, so that others taste the sweetness of life? Me? I’ll probably go out to buy a few small gifts late on Christmas Eve, not to a mall, but somewhere with a main street and colored lights and I’ll feel a bit like an extra in one of those old movies about the meaning of the season. But by then I will have already sent out the more important gifts to the organizations I like to support. And no, I’m no angel – it’s just so much easier than the stuff-acquisition (even taking into account internet-ordering). And I never could belt out a carol on a full stomach.



I've not quite cracked the task of adding a video link, but if you go here, you'll find my favorite holiday song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBfEGETyGjs