I am glad to have reached the first week in January of 2024 without telling a lot of people to simply fuck off and leave me alone during the past month. The urge is, I’m afraid, great and growing stronger every year.
The Xmas season does that to me, beginning as it does in early September, when Canadian Tire and other box stores start putting Xmas lights and decorations on display for sale. The selling season continues through the late fall when suddenly every radio station, box store, and most retail outlets seem to play the same, endless loops of cheesy remakes and commercial pap Xmas music for hours on end. It accelerates into December when stores display aisle-blocking piles of made-in-China Santa gifts. Hundreds of emails flood my inbox daily, exhorting me to buy! buy! buy! from before the American Black Friday consumer-grift event through to Boxing Day, and then to the we’ve-extended-the-sales-another-week-sales to wring the most cash out of the season.
The Xmas season lasts, at least in some local box stores, for four months, and I am heartily weary of it even before October arrives. I will not be surprised to see it start in August or even July in future.*
As a non-believer in religious or supernatural content (hence Xmas instead of Christmas)**, my views on the egregious consumerism and commercialization of what is supposed to be a short religious celebration is, you might say, sardonic. I generally have no complaints over any religious observation for any faith, other than not being required to participate. But the stores, the radios, the public service announcements, the emails, the ads don’t let anyone forget that now is the season to spend as much money as I possibly can to participate in the corporate bingefest because that’s what’s expected of complaint consumers. Very Orwellian.
Consumers run the gauntlet between heavily-promoted, high-pressure selling seasons throughout the year. Next will come the saccharine Valentine’s Day, then Easter (complete with pagan bunnies), then end-of-school-get-ready-for-summer sales season, then summer sales (with Black-Friday-in-summer deals), fall pre-Black-Friday sales, Halloween sales, then Thanksgiving and Black Friday and Cyber Monday, then Xmas and Boxing Day. And then throw in a few national holidays, numerous artificial celebratory days (National Pet Day, National Bicycle Day, National Cocktail Day, etc.), and major sporting events. Resistance is futile: there is no respite. Our shopping calendar is full and we’re expected to spend to fulfill our obligations as captives in the capitalist system.
The religious aspect of the event is easily forgotten, buried below the strident sales pitches and quantities-are-limited-so-don’t-wait ads. Order today to get it before Xmas! Buy two and get extra loyalty points!
Wouldn’t Jesus want you to buy this cyclonic vacuum cleaner while supplies last? Wouldn’t Jesus want you to buy this gift box of mass-produced chocolates? This rechargeable drill? This loungewear set? These vinyl Minecraft figures for your kids? This bottle of handcrafted premium vodka? While you’re at it, buy a turkey because nothing says Middle Eastern peasant’s meal like a farmed, hormone-injected, flightless North American bird. And don’t forget to decorate that symbol of the pagan winter solstice: the Xmas tree.
There never was a “war on Christmas” — that was a hoax invented by hypocritical Repugnicans through that Russian propaganda outlet, Fox Newz, so they could play the victim of a liberal conspiracy — but perhaps there should be. Not on the religious aspects, but on the aggressive, unrelenting consumerism. At least to constrain it to a few weeks. In his satirical song, A Christmas Carol, Tom Lehrer sang:
Hark, the Herald Tribune sings
Advertising wondrous things
God rest ye merry merchants
May ye make the Yuletide pay
Angels we have heard on high
Tell us to go out and – buy!
Christopher Hitchens famously said the month of December had the “atmosphere of a one-party state…”
On all media and in all newspapers, endless invocations of the same repetitive theme. In all public places, from train stations to department stores, an insistent din of identical propaganda and identical music. The collectivization of gaiety and the compulsory infliction of joy.***
If only it was just the month of December…
Sure, shrug it off as mere Scroogian humbug, but you know it’s true. There’s a lot more of Santa**** promoting sales at Xmas and pushing everything from snowblowers to microwaves to boxed DVD sets than anything to do with the birth of a Middle Eastern baby named Yehoshua (aka Jesus) who became a radical rabbi two millennia ago. And as we move towards the end of the year, every charity, every association, every not-for-profit group, and every political party sends begging emails asking for donations, increasing in volume and shrillness until we crest Dec. 31. As someone who donates to a small group of local charities and causes as much as I can, given my limited resources, I find the clamour for more! more! more! both annoying and frightening. It seems like the death of a thousand cuts.
I understand why some people — richer than I am — like to go away to foreign lands and sunnier climes for December and the peak of the Xmas season: to escape the crassness and constant dunning of it all. I would do so too, had I the resources and get away from “old December’s bareness everywhere” as Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 97. Maybe by sunning myself on some distant tropical beach instead of cringing under a barrage of cheesy music and ads, I might not be so grumpy during the season.
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* In mid-December, I saw Easter Bunny chocolates for sale in the local Walmart, almost four months before the date of Easter. It’s called “holiday creep” but the worst and longest is Christmas Creep because it starts here shortly after Labour Day. And the longer it lasts, the less I am inclined to buy anything, the more cynical and intolerant I become towards the event. No, I don’t want to give a “small donation” at the cash register when I’m buying groceries, wine, or socks. I’m pretty sure the corporation that owns the store can afford it better than I can. They don’t even offer to match my donation, just dun me to give.
** I prefer the term “non-believer” to atheist because the latter has assumed some unfortunate political and social attributes for many. In a future post, I may explain why I am a non-believer, but in the meantime, you can read Hitchens or Richard Dawkins to get some inkling of my views.
*** Christopher Hitchens, 2005: Bah, Humbug, in his book of collected essays, And Yet…, Penguin Random House, 2015. Hitchens added,
…none of this party-line unanimity is enough for the party’s true hard-liners. The slogans must be exactly right. No “Happy Holidays” or even “Cool Yule” or a cheery Dickensian “Compliments of the season.” No, all banners and chants must be specifically designated in honor of the birth of the Dear Leader and the authority of the Great Leader.
A second essay about Xmas is included in his book, titled, The True Spirit of Christmas, in which Hitchens writes, “The reason for the success of the Lehrer song is that it so perfectly captures the sense of irritated, bored resignation that descends on so many of us at this time of year… Compulsory bad taste isn’t a good cultural sign… How much less appealing is the notion of compulsory generosity… The Christmas cycle imposes a deadening routine and predictability.”
**** During the early 20th century, thanks to relentless advertising and commercial promotion, Santa became a powerful deity in the large Christian pantheon, after Yehoshua and Yaweh, fighting for dominance with Mary and the Holy Spirit, but above the numerous demigod saints and angels. He is prayed to and written to by millions of children during the season. He has omniscience and while not omnipotent, is not subject to the laws of physics or spacetime. Santa also runs a slave labour camp of elves, but that doesn’t seem to bother believers any more than Putin’s slave-labour gulags do.
