The Spirit of Christmas

I totally believe in the spirit of Christmas – the only problem is that if there is a spirit of Christmas these days it’s an evil one. If you don’t believe me just go on down to your local Target today. Loving, Christmas spirit filled people will try to ram you with their cars, steal your parking space, and deliberately try to run you over as you’re walking – and all that’s just in the parking lot! Inside it’s no better. They’ll ram you with their carts, body check you for the crime of standing in the same aisle and cut in front of you in line, all with the most stressed out, hate filled expressions imaginable. I said "Merry Christmas" to everyone who was rude to me there and ended up saying it twenty times. Instead of a happy, loving time our culture has created another anxious, competitive gauntlet. A parent’s love is measured by their ability to find scarce items, and a spouses by their willingness to go into debt by splurging on useless ones. As usual in our materialistic society the only way we can express love is by spending money.

From a merchant’s perspective, it’s no better. When I was a mere clerk in a once great bookshop that has since chained itself to the dark side, we knew we’d be in for a month of backbreaking work, but also we knew it would end soon enough and (most of us) pitched in together and it was sort of exhilarating, if exhausting. Now that I’m higher up in the chain I see how anxiety producing it is for business as well as the consumer. Many businesses break even the rest of the year and absolutely rely on the Christmas season to make a profit. After Thanksgiving you expect, even need to be busy all the time, and if you’re not you’re tearing out your hair, which doesn’t make for great holiday cheer. That’s the reason the facile suggestions of ignorant pundits like, say, Susan Ager of the Detroit Free Press, who want us all to stop buying stuff and just give each other handwritten notes or handmade ass scratchers are so full of crap. I love it when someone like her rails against the commercialization of Christmas in the newspaper next to the full page holiday ads and full color inserts that pay her salary. Yeah, lets just call a halt to it and you can go back on unemployment like you deserve, Sue. That’s what’s great about what I do – being a merchant at street level gives me a much clearer view of reality that the college professors and newspaper writers who are so shameless in parading their pie in the sky opinions. I can’t let theory get in the way of practice – it’s not a question of interpretation, it’s a question of dollars, and I can tell you that if cultural commissars like Ager and the vegan bloggers out there had their way and the holiday madness stopped overnight there would be a Black Friday to rival that of 1929.

For me the answer is, well, a return to love. People are so scheduled and regimented these days that they seem to need to be reminded and culturally coerced to buy something for a loved one at a pre-approved date. I know it’ll never happen, but couldn’t we just spread the toxic concentration of it out a little and give presents when we find them? It’s all clustered around this "religious" holiday which has so little of the religious about it. I’m no Christian, but I’m in favor of any occasion that promotes peace and goodwill toward men, but those elements have disappeared from Christmas, the same way, judging from the policies of lying, killing and hatred promulgated by that great evangelical avatar George W. Bush, they’ve disappeared from Christianity. Ho ho ho.