I have posted about this subject before, but it’s been on my mind the past several weeks, so I thought it was worth bringing up again. I work a Christmas job in which I spend my weekends talking to lots of families, especially children, and so I get an interesting sampling of the way people act and think around Christmastime.
At my job, the doors of our cast area/dressing rooms are with hung with children’s Christmas lists that we’ve received this year. Some are scrawled in pencil, but most of them are cut-out ads pasted on paper with a line or two of writing. The notes are generally polite— “Dear Santa, here is what I want, please!” “Are your elves healthy?” “What kind of milk do you like best?” Heartwarming? Absolutely.
However, when I move beyond the polite words, I find the lists quite depressing. A child who writes in half-inch letters asked for a digital camera and six different video games, each one more expensive than the one before. More than one kid included a laundry list of over ten costly things that he or she wanted, all of them name-brands. The trend continues when I talk to the children in person. A boy on Santa’s lap asked for everything on the front page of a Toys R Us catalog. Tiny children continue to ask for Wii systems and MP3 players. When I asked what a 13-year old what she wanted for Christmas, she replied, “An iPad,” and her mother didn’t even flinch.
Do I blame the kids for being greedy? Not exactly. The human heart is greedy from the start, but it’s clear that these kids are being fed consumerism. As usual, the children are a smaller and more dramatic version of the problems that plague adults.
Despite the warm fuzzies we all get when we watch A Charlie Brown Christmas, most people have fallen prey to the social pressure of a search for what makes you happy. Material things can’t give us joy, of course— everybody knows that. And so the Christmastime culture has invented a less threatening alternative: If you love your children/friends/family/coworkers/dog, you’ll get them everything they need to make them happy. This of course leads to, If you care about yourself, you’ll get yourself everything you need to make yourself happy.
This of course begs the question: what is it that we want? (Obviously it’s not a need, but a desire.) The thing that strikes me most about people is we all want to be accepted. This translates into, we want to wear what is acceptable, and buy what is acceptable, and act in a way that is acceptable. It’s no coincidence that nearly half of the little girls I’ve seen at my job this year have a small braid and/or feathers in their hair, and every third person I see is wearing a tasseled hat with an animal face on top. A trend occurs, and everybody follows. The children’s wish lists are eerily similar— what could inspire every single one to ask for a pillow pet or an American Girl doll? (And why did half the women last year wear that odd pseudo-Escher-black-and-white-checkered pattern on their coats?)
The culture dictates what is acceptable. People choose the easiest, the fastest, and the cheapest. Flashier is better; name-brand is better; more is better. Christmas shoppers feel stressed about finding the right present, pressured by the constant push of the retailers, the advertisements, their own traditions, their family’s expectations, and cultural brainwashing. People are indoctrinated in the constant search for more.
What is the solution to resisting this stampede of misled ideology? The answer, of course, is just taking a moment to think. At my job one day, I asked a little girl, “What do you want for Christmas?” She thought earnestly for a few seconds, and then replied with a thoughtful expression, “I’ll like whatever Santa wants to get me.” It was a breath of peace in a madhouse of wants and wishes.
We must step back for a moment and consider— am I enjoying gift-giving (or anything else) for what it is, or because I am required to do so? Do I want something because I will truly enjoy it (but will be content without it), or am I being greedy? The antidote to greed is, of course, contentment. However, this contentment is not limited to what we have, but to what we do. If that means giving only one present to each person for Christmas this year, then we must be content in our decision to do so. We must all take a deep breath, remember that neither greedy getting nor stressful giving can grant us peace, and then relax.
~Lisa Shafter
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