Too Much Christmas!

"It's the most wonderful time of the year! With the kids jingle belling and everyone telling you, 'be a good cheer!' It's the most wonderful time of the year!"
- Andy Williams

What a load of crap.

Now, I celebrate Christmas just like 90% of people in the Western world. But how the most well-known and widely celebrated holiday there is got hijacked by commercialism is a sad reflection on the state of our culture. Yes, there are people out there that revel in the Christmas spirit starting sometime around the end of September. These are the people who put more Christmas lights on their house than Clark Griswold. They never seem to understand the damage and the stress they inflict on the rest of us.

Until this year, I just went along with the flow each December like anyone else. This time around though, I'm a lot more cynical. I thought about this when I was sitting down at the Starbucks at the local mall after I had bought my last Christmas gift, sipping on a hot chocolate and just watching the people stroll by with hundreds of dollars worth of gifts in hand. What compels people to buy so many presents?

Thankfully, the only retail job I've ever held in my life was at a convenience store -- hardly a Christmas shopping mecca. But this year, I seemed to feel for those people behind the register at the mall. Has anyone thought of those poor retail slaves working extended hours (24 hours in some cases), being forced to listen to endless campy songs about how great this holiday is, and somehow manage to keep a smile through it all?

And people do their best to try and get the best gifts for the loved ones. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, as West 49 showed with their commercial last year. Some (all?) of those kids are probably spoiled brats, but let's look at the big picture: they set themselves up to expect something big because of the magnitude of the holiday.

Let's go back to why Christmas even exists in the first place - a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. I'm not going to turn this into a religious sermon, but it seems that's lost on most people. The tradition of gift-giving is usually based on the three wisemen and their gold, myrrh and frankincense.

It's interesting to note that in the early 19th Century, Christmas celebrations in both Britain and the U.S. were dying out. It took A Visit From St. Nicholas (a.k.a. Twas the Night Before Christmas) to popularize gift giving, and it took Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol to bring it back to the forefront of the public consciousness. So a holiday that has existed in some, way, shape or form for almost 2000 years has only taken on this dimension within the last 200.

"We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket. It's run by a big Eastern syndicate, you know."
- Lucy Van Pelt, A Charlie Brown Christmas

Charles Schulz probably thought the same thing I did when he wrote that 40 years ago. Why do we even give gifts at Christmas? The reasoning seems to be lost on most people, and the commercialism involved has gone out of control. I wish we could throttle back....maybe not eliminate gift-giving entirely, but go back to the roots of the holiday and putting the emphasis back on spending time with family, friends and loved ones. But maybe it's too late.

(c)2007 J.P. Kirby. All rights reserved.

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