The Annual Christmas Diatribe

Plastic Santas have been pulled out of storage, and lights are strung throughout the neighborhood. Tune in to almost any radio station, and you are sure to hear the sounds of Christmas classics wafting over the airwaves. Envelopes of red and green are starting to appear in mailboxes. It’s that time of year again.

It’s time to rail against the rampant commercialism and compulsory gift giving that have hijacked the Christmas holiday.

If you take the practice of exchanging gifts as commonly practiced, and boil it down to the essentials, here’s what you get: You take your hard earned money, and you buy something for someone that they don’t really need. After all, if they had really needed it, they would have bought it for themselves. In exchange, they take their hard earned money and buy you something that you don’t really need.

Once the gift giving is completed and all the packages are opened, what do you have? (Besides two garbage cans filled with torn off wrapping paper and packaging.) You have a bunch of new stuff that you now have to store.

Americans are the most over stuffed people in the history of the planet. Our walk-in closets are filled to overflowing, so we haul our summer clothes up to attic to make room for the winter clothes. We have two car garages that hold only one car, because the rest of the space is stacked high with stuff, most of which never gets used. We have so much stuff that we rent mini-storage units to hold the overflow.

In an ideal world, we would have only the things we used. Our stuff would exist to take care of us. Instead, too often we spend our energy and money taking care of our stuff.

Besides, having too much stuff, most of the Christmas presents I’ve seen in the last few years are all made in China. So aside from a few store clerks, other Americans are not getting any benefit from our spending. We’re impoverishing ourselves to enrich people on the far side of the world. So much for the economic stimulus given by our rampant commercialism. Think about it: are you a net winner from the on-rush of Christmas spending?

I have to stop. Just thinking about this subject makes me foam at the mouth like a rabid squirrel. Right now I have more froth than a Starbucks cappuccino.

I’m not totally anti-Christmas. I love the festivities, the parties, the gatherings of friends and family that come with the season.

But the mandatory gift giving foisted on us by society? To that I say, Bah, humbug!