Opinion: Andy Hofmann on the Christmas Shopping Season

The Christmas Shopping season rolls around, and we’re inundated with ads.

Holiday sales, Black Friday deals, time to buy presents, get the “best savings,” go to Walmart, buy the turkey, hang the lights: the ads.

Santa and snow and smiling people and fireplaces and evergreen trees, we are swamped with a Commercial Christmas that cannibalises our childhoods and sells it back to us. It is uncaring. It is evil. It is the backbone of the retail industry.

Also, it’s really quite annoying.

At least, that’s what a good deal of people say around this time of year: late in October, slowly, there is a murmur of complaint as retailers begin to obliquely reference The Holiday. Through November these grumblings begin to grow, rising from a whisper to a shout, finally to a cry of outrage as Black Friday rolls past, and once again fall to a murmur as the the “real” holiday season begins to chart its course in December.

Their complaint, essentially, is one of opposition to the gigantic economic machine that has begun to exist surrounding the holiday; the view is that, through advertising slogans and big-box retailers, life is somehow made fundamentally worse.

It’s not an opinion I particularly agree with. I view the whole Shopping Season as strange, but rather benign, cultural phenomenon. In some regards, the shopping season is actually beneficial.

The Christmas shopping season is a gigantic driver of sales and a general booster to the economy: in December 2010 retailers saw $27.2 billion in sales, a 44 percent increase in over November of that year. Just last year, according to the Consumer Confidence Index, confidence rose by ten points in the month of December.

To put it plainly: Christmas-time can be an important driver of the economy, one that helps motivate the spending that a healthy capitalist society requires.

Furthermore, I find it strange how these individuals are essentially complaining about a longer amount of time to buy gifts to people. Not only are they complaining about getting lower prices for Christmas presents for a longer period of time, but they are complaining, essentially, that people are buying gifts for people. People can make as many arguments as they want, but that is, ultimately, what complaining about the Christmas Shopping Season boils down to.

The opinion itself is interestingly automatic and basic among certain kinds of individuals, i.e., intellectuals, counterculture enthusiasts, and general contrarians; its prevalence, at times, is as startling to me as most individuals’ inability to defend the claim. Essentially, what I’m boiling down to here, is a singular question: Why do people complain about The Christmas Shopping Season?

There could be a variety of reasons. One is, simply, that they don’t like Christmas–they’re a plain old grinch, an opinion I can’t disagree with so much as it misses the point of the complaint entirely. Most people actually do like Christmas– yet they complain about the shopping season that surrounds it.

You could also oppose capitalist society and tendencies entirely, another valid argument, but one only made by either living in a cabin in the woods by yourself or actively trying to overthrow the government (and, at that point, I’d think Christmas is the least of your concerns)–if you’re a person who buys things, and likes the things you buy, this argument fails in justifying you. For most people, this conceit would be an ill-thought rationalization used to justify an opinion one already possessed.

Or, more reasonably, maybe you view the Christmas shopping season as a perversion of the holiday– the cannibalism of the Christmas Way into a cynical corporate moneygrab. People say they see Christmas losing its innocence, its magical spirit. They oppose the Christmas season because the want to preserve Christmas’s special-ness.

Here’s a thought, though; people tend to point out and be critical about faults or worries they find in themselves. They’re concerned that the loss of innocence and commercialization they see in the earliness of the shopping season represents their own corruption and materialism. They see the holiday ads– the ones that turn a holiday about giving into a holiday about buying– and see themselves staring right back. It makes us worry that the world was not as wonderful as it once was.

Do you like buying things? Do you like giving things? Because, in a way, our fears are right: we like buying, we like spending, we like getting great deals on the things we need. The pleasures of giving and altruism are less carnal, id-based, and materialistic than that of receiving, and much easier to resort to.

We criticize the Christmas season because of our uncomfortable situation with it– we want to be kind people, the ideas of Christmas want us to be kind people, but all the while we’re incentivized to give in to less-than-kind desires. This is the conflict most Christmas detractors run into: to “fix” Christmas we must first fix ourselves. We must be what we want the holiday to be. Otherwise, we’re forced to accept Christmas materialism wholesale.