This is probably going to sound like a silly cliché that old-timers say, but I'm being totally honest when I say it: it feels like the Christmas hype starts earlier and earlier every year. This year, I could swear that I started seeing holiday-themed commercials on TV before Halloween even happened. I know for a fact that I saw them well before Turkey Day, and if you ask me that's way, way, WAY too early as it is. I can only stand a week and a half (two weeks at the very most) of Christmas music before I start retching, so you can imagine how I feel about enduring almost two months of advertisements peppered with holly twigs, snowflakes, wreaths, flashes of red and green, and the annoying sound of sleigh bells. I think there ought to be a law that forbids Christmastime advertising of any kind until after Thanksgiving.
People would probably argue that doing so would be counter-productive in terms of having a successful "Black Friday", but then we all know that every store opens ridiculously early and has ridiculous sales on the day after Thanksgiving, so all that people who are interested enough would have to do is to ask their favorite stores when they'll open that day. One thing's for sure: the only place you'd find me on that day is at home. It's not that I don't like a good sale as much as the next guy ... hey, I've been known to use coupons just because I have them. Instead, it's the spirit behind it -- and that's the one kind of Christmas "spirit" I can definitely do without. We've all seen the images of those stampedes of people who flood into the stores the instant the doors open the morning after the feast, and we hear almost every year about someone actually getting killed in one of those hordes. No amount of savings is worth enduring that chaos, and anybody who voluntarily goes out to take part in it has got to be clinically insane.
I have to wonder what happens come December to all the religious conservatives out there. The other eleven months of the year they're all in the faces of us secular folk about embracing Jesus as their savior and living "a Christian life" (whatever arbitrary criteria that phrase is supposed to fit), but where are they when the blatant commercialization of their holiest of holy days rears its ugly head? Far be it from me to trash-talk a group of people based on their faith, but I rather suspect they're some of the first ones out there, waiting in line at 2 A.M. the morning after Thanksgiving to buy that $199 flat-screen TV for their kids. Personally, I'm at neither extreme. I'm not religious, so Christmas isn't any kind of "sacred cow" to me (we don't even feel compelled to put up decorations at home, except for maybe a wreath or two). Nor do I tend to put any importance on either the monetary value or the quantity of the gifts that I give -- I usually stick with making little home-made gifts for family and friends in the interest of keeping it simple, relatively inexpensive, and more personalized -- and I hold no expectations for the gifts that I may receive from others (or may not -- not everyone's in the position to give gifts, after all).
America needs to make up its mind how it feels about Christmas, but the way the media and culture perpetuate our lemming-like consumerist attitudes, I don't see a change coming anytime soon. Most people think Christmas is all about Santa Claus, and they don't take it seriously enough; most of the rest take Christmas way too seriously and make it all about the Baby Jesus; but I'm comfortable standing on the middle ground, believing that the most important people at Christmastime are my family and close friends. I have to wonder what the world would be like if we all gave that approach a try.
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