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Christmas in the U.S. effectively wraps together religion, patriotism, and materialism—while rationalizing it all as being in furtherance of American values and being good for the soul. Amanda Mull recently wrote an interesting piece for The Atlantic, titled “Christmas Must Go On,” which pondered whether the pandemic might force people, and society as a whole, to reassess whether this annual custom actually makes sense. Mull argues that celebrating Christmas—not in a religious way, but as a consumer—affirms a person as a part of their community. Therefore, instead of the pandemic causing people to pull back from these behaviors, most will likely move to embrace them even more, out of a desire for normalcy.
In America, the economic, the religious, and the patriotic can’t be easily separated. Dell deChant, a religion professor at the University of South Florida and the author of The Sacred Santa: Religious Dimensions of Consumer Culture, calls Christmas “a huge ritual celebration honoring the economy and feeding the economy.” God, country, and cash are particularly tightly entwined during a year when America’s leaders can’t stop telling us that keeping the economy humming is our sacred duty … Granted, certain aspects of Christmas won’t be the same in 2020. Many of us won’t be able to travel great distances to visit our families, and older relatives might not be able to see much of anyone at all. (Three) hundred thousand people and counting are gone, and millions of others have lost the income that funds bounteous celebrations. Still, deChant believes that the drive to create as much of the old Christmas feeling as possible will likely be strong.
“Christmas is a great normalizing experience—it’s powerful in terms of our personal and cultural identity,” he says. “If we’re not able to consume, then, to a certain extent, we’re marginalized—within the culture, as well as in our own minds.” For many Americans who don’t celebrate Christmas, sitting out the foofaraw while the whole country conducts Christmas consumption is an annual dose of alienation. For people who normally participate but suddenly find themselves unable to do so, the sense of detachment might even be more piercing for its novelty. Buying not just gifts, but decorations, sweets, and the trappings of a Christmas feast are deeply entrenched customs, and many Americans will want to hang on to those rituals in a world where so much else has been disrupted. For some, keeping Christmas, as a transformed Scrooge put it, will feel profoundly comforting. For others, the wish to do Christmas right will be tinged with defiance. Think we can’t buy gifts galore and decorate like busy little elves straight through a disaster? Think again.
Our deep-seated feelings about Christmas might make these arguments seem like a rant Ebenezer Scrooge would embrace while screaming “Bah! Humbug!” But as Jacob Marley and the ghosts lurk in the background, perhaps we can explore this topic in a familiar way.
Christmas Past
Christmas, as a holiday, has existed in some form since the middle of the fourth century. The origins of the Dec. 25 date have long been the source of competing theories. According to Saint Augustine, late December corresponds to the winter solstice on the Roman calendar; he argued it symbolically represented a celebration on the shortest day with the most darkness, with the light growing more and more each day after, representative of Christ being the light of the world. Other theories posit the early Christian church coopted the winter solstice and festivals meant to honor the Roman deities Saturn and Sol Invictus. Saturnalia included modern Christmas elements, such as gift giving, candle lighting, and decorated trees.
Fast forward 1,400 years and the holiday is now controversial. In part because of its quasi-pagan origins, Puritans and Protestants objected to the celebration of Christmas, which was then associated with drunkenness and debauchery. In 17th-century America, celebrating Christmas was illegal, and could result in a fine of five shillings. Acts of British Parliament in the 1640s effectively banned Christmas; what are now traditional aspects of the holiday were deemed the behavior of heathens; and defiantly singing Christmas songs was considered “a political act.”
The modern iteration of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian movement which emerged in the 1830s and 1840s and embraced old rituals and past religious traditions, alongside the popularization of ideas found in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Dickens’ novella captured popular sentiment in England seeking to restore the holiday, while reinforcing certain ideas about poverty and human indifference to suffering. In doing so, A Christmas Carol is a direct rebuke of the popular social theories put forward by economist Robert Malthus, who linked poverty and hunger to population. Malthus, like Thanos after him, believed poverty was a byproduct of “surplus population”; undesirables eating up food and competing for jobs should be treated with a heavy hand to discourage proliferation. Using Malthus’s theories as justification, the British government of the time condoned brutal conditions within workhouses in order to punish people for being poor. Leadership also rationalized lack of government support to the poor, since it was preferable that the impoverished starve and decrease the surplus population. Dickens put Malthus’s own words into Ebeneezer Scrooge’s mouth in order to shame those who embraced him.
The phrase “Merry Christmas” has existed since at least the early 16th century, but A Christmas Carol made it popular, while also accentuating certain customs and traditions. Most of the trappings of a modern Christmas—carolers, Christmas trees, gift giving, toys for children, Christmas cards, and even paid time off—can be found in the story. Moreover, A Christmas Carol decouples Christmas, to a degree, from Christianity, making the day about far more than a deity’s birth.
As Dickens’ story spread in Victorian England, Clement Clarke Moore’s poem—about a fat man in a red suit who has a sweatshop at the North Pole and likes to hand out toys—was becoming extremely popular in the United States. The poem, which was a reworking of the legend of Saint Nicholas, helped create the modern conception for Santa Claus. But Santa Claus served another purpose. Attaching Christmas and the Santa Claus narrative to the innocence of youth, the buying of toys, and images of content families at home helped move celebrations of Christmas from the poor in pubs and revelling on the street, similar to Halloween and New Year’s Day, to a middle-class setting, enjoyed by a wealthier elite. The holiday also worked as a strategy to allay elites’ concerns about young people in urban environments and potential social unrest by championing an aspirational day spent at home. When coupled with Dickens’s message of giving and goodwill, as well as the emerging commercialism of the 20th century, the entire scene became a very efficient foundation for marketing products and opening wallets.
Christmas Present
Today, we require people to abandon the one value that’s supposed to be at the heart of Christmas—or at least the Hallmark version of it. In order to afford all the trimmings of Christmas, many people must separate themselves from their families for more and more hours of work.
The commercialization of Christmas inexorably linked the holiday to quarterly economic growth and year-over-year sales figures. Over $1 trillion in sales are generated during the Christmas holiday, and 70% of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) comes from consumer spending. This drives businesses to expand the contours of the Christmas shopping season to greater and greater lengths, at the expense of their workers’ peace of mind and safety. Even before the pandemic, the retail sector had become a horror show; declining sales, as online shopping surged, pushed brick-and-mortar businesses to change the meaning of “Black Friday” to include Thanksgiving Thursday, forcing workers to skip out on dinner with their families if they want to keep their jobs.
While a certain politician was touting “the greatest economy in the history of our country,” and even before masks and limited capacities inside stores became a thing, the retail sector was in a deep decline. Approximately 10,000 brick-and-mortar stores closed in 2019 alone, with brands such as Sears, Kmart, JCPenney, Payless, and Family Dollar making up part of an economic “apocalypse” that continued in 2020, as the pandemic and lockdowns took their toll. Twenty-nine additional retailers have declared bankruptcy this year.
But during a pandemic where the CDC is telling families to avoid large gatherings, are retail workers in Macy’s really so “essential” that they need be in a crowded store in order to sell bedsheets and Coach purses? In an attempt to compensate for expected pandemic-related losses, the holiday sale season was expanded to take up nearly one-quarter of the calendar in order to lure buyers. So far, it’s working—somewhat.
The most recent Black Friday saw thinner crowds at retail locations, but significant growth in online sales—which saw a 15% uptick from last year. Analyses indicated the average shopper spent $312 during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend period, a 14% decline from 2019. For the holiday as a whole, Americans are projected to spend around $1,000 total on gifts and Christmas-related expenses, $123 of that on a spouse or significant other. Among American shoppers, 22% of the public believes Christmas bills will leave them at least $500 in debt, and 45% feel pressured to overspend.
It’s interesting to consider how spending and marketing and debt intersect with a holiday which is supposedly about generosity and giving. If Dickens’ lesson for Scrooge was about the wealth of spirit that comes from giving to those less fortunate, how is that reflected in all of these transactions? According to a 2014 report, about one-third of all charitable giving happens in the final three months of the year; 18% occurs in December alone. Do people need to know their year-end financial situation before they give to charity? Could it be people are trying to increase their tax refund? Might some only think of others and find it in their hearts to open their wallets at a certain point of the calendar? Might generosity only kick in when Santa Claus, Jesus, and a stroking of egos are involved? That is debatable, but some research indicates charitable giving during the Christmas holiday is tied to the “warm glow” of the season.
Because when one really thinks about it, what difference is there between a family in ancient Greece sacrificing cattle they worked all year to sustain at a temple in order to gain spiritual favor, and people in the here and now spending what money they’ve earned all year at a mall (or on Amazon Prime) in order to catch the Christmas spirit and enjoy a happy new year?
Christmas Yet to Come
Are there alternatives to more spending and bigger and more lavish events, during (and after) a pandemic? On the event front this year, many will only see their families over FaceTime and Zoom if they abandon their travel plans as recommended. Some children are giving their Christmas lists to Santa on virtual calls instead of at malls, while drive-through light shows allow those with cars to safely enjoy the sparkles of the season.
But for those tired of seeing what money they actually put in the bank disappear come December, are there options post-COVID-19? Some advocate for making Christmas celebrations more personal, more productive for one’s family and community, and less about consumerism. Back in 2018, Joe Pinsker had a piece in The Atlantic which profiled families who eschewed the usual Christmas shopping routine. These innovative traditions seem even more relevant today.
Heather Hund and her family will gather in West Texas on December 25 and solidify a new Christmas tradition, in which each relative is randomly assigned to give a gift to another family member and to a house pet. “The rules are basically a regift for the human and then $10 for the pet,” Hund told me. “And my 18-month-old son got put in [the latter] category too, so it’s small humans and small animals.”
Hund and her family downscaled their gift-giving six years ago after considering how much work Christmas shopping was. “I just remember coming home and being super stressed and last-minute trying to run out to the mall or looking online and seeing what I could get shipped in like three days,” said Hund, who’s 35 and works in tech in San Francisco. Now, with the extra time she and her family have, they paint pottery together, cook, go on runs, and play cards. Plus, they get meaningful presents through the regifting agreement, such as the Led Zeppelin record Hund received from her dad, purchased when he was in high school. The new gifting protocol has been a joy. “The first year I thought I would be sad about it,” she said, “and I really wasn’t.”
David Tucker, a 33-year-old engineer at a software company who lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, told me that he and his wife stopped giving gifts three years ago. “It was a mixture of a lot of things,” he said, “but we both started to share a disdain for the holidays” and the marketing involved, especially after a couple financially tight years. They found themselves surrounded by stuff, and not needing any more of it. So they started donating their annual gift budget to charity, which means that their holiday shopping now takes just a few minutes. Tucker said that this mentality has shaped his habits during the rest of the year—he and his wife now volunteer more at their local food bank. “Why should it stop there?,” he remembered thinking about his holiday donations.
Is this sort of thinking likely to spread throughout the culture and take hold over time? Probably not. My guess would be the pull of that “warm glow” may be too strong for most to resist. Complaining about Christmas spending and commercialism is also sort of like Mr. Pink ranting about tipping in restaurants in Reservoir Dogs. He may have a point about inconsistency, and the entire social custom being illogical, but he also sounds selfish. Holiday spending, like tipping, is so ingrained in the culture that not doing it elicits weird stares, and isolates one within their social circle—think of that feeling when someone gets you a gift and you don’t have one for them, or vice versa, or how you feel when splitting a bill with someone who refuses to contribute to a proper tip. It goes against an established norm.
If someone’s child is excited to see Santa, sees other kids celebrating, and has their heart set on a PlayStation 5 or iPhone, do we really believe most parents would deny their kids the joy of a gift-filled Christmas morning? This ideal has brought us to the point where people leave the Thanksgiving table to wait in the cold for a discount. This materialism, and the happiness it fuels, represent both the best and worst aspects of the Christmas holiday; they are a reflection of the world we have built.
Regardless of whether someone’s boss is a dick(ens) for withholding an end-of-year bonus, there’s something to be said about a system where people work like dogs all year, some at multiple jobs, and yet every December, find keeping Christmas to be a struggle. As we start 2021, with hope of a new beginning after COVID-19 and the disastrous presidency of Donald Trump, the economic issues that shape Christmas shopping and the larger economy will persist, because the inequalities of the system persist. No one should work 80 hours per week at multiple jobs just to make ends meet, much less take out a payday loan just to buy presents at Christmas. But here we are with our very own Republican Ebenezer Scrooges, worried that poor people might get too much help.
A desire to express the love in our hearts is no excuse to take on the chains of debt, yet somewhere along the way we’ve decided that’s a normal part of a Merry Christmas. It doesn’t have to be that way, of course. We all have the power to change the shape of our Christmases yet to come.
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