If you’re not in the mood for a Christmas rant, I suggest you turn to one of my more positive and upbeat posts. You might want to check back here in a few days when you’ve had enough festiveness. My rant has been building up for a while and had to explode sometime. I guess just before the festival begins is as good a time as any.
Let me say first of all that I really enjoy the Christmas of holiday, family, gifts, pine trees, pretty lights, good food and mulled wine. What I don’t enjoy is the blatant commercial pressure to celebrate in a particular way. The Corporate Way.
It’s hard to avoid the constant bombardment of messages about what Christmas ’should’ look like with its avalanches of snow, expensive gifts and fake smiles. When it’s combined with crystal clear messages about what presents to buy (assuming that you do, in fact, LOVE your children!) then I just want to hide away and only come out when it’s over. I really sympathise with the Grinch and Scrooge.
Leave me alone – I want to be free to celebrate in my own way!!!
I was impressed when I first moved to Eastern Europe in 1994. Decorations started coming out a few days before Christmas and giving gifts was much more a symbolic matter with shops subdued in their promotion of the concept. Kids, generally speaking, received a few small gifts and adults none. The focus was on family gatherings, going to church, eating and celebrating together. I found there to be a real respect when everyone greeted each other with personal wishes spoken face to face rather than written on a garish card. It seemed that generosity was from the heart and not from the pocket.
14 years on and the Corporate Takeover is almost complete. Around mid-October the retail trade starts reminding us of the impending joyful days and the message is clear. Spend! Spend! Spend! A few shops don’t even bother to take down the tinsel and baubles but leave them up. Why remove them when you can use Christmas to encourage people to be buying all year round?
Over recent decades a new Church (of Commercialism) has copied the early Christians and has been stealing Christmas from under our noses. Originally, of course, it was a pagan festival to mark the winter solstice until the early Christian Church cleverly stole it. As they did it so gracefully and so long ago, we’ve accepted Christmas as a mainly Christian festival to celebrate the birth of Jesus, a reasonably important symbol to Christians.
Now it seems the takeover of Christmas is almost complete, with the corporate world mopping up with what might best be described as a ‘re-branding exercise’. It’s become ‘politically incorrect’ to talk about ‘Christmas’ for fear of alienating people of other faith or no faith. After all, non-Christians have money and know how to party too, don’t they? Why should they be excluded from the spending spree? I’m not sure what ‘politics’ has to do with this and it’s more accurate to call it ‘corporately incorrect’.
Even Santa Claus is not exempt from the re-branding. He’s increasingly called ‘Father Christmas’ which I suspect is transitional and a step away from his Catholic roots (Santa = Saint). Clearly ‘Father Xmas’ would be a bigger step on the way to becoming the ‘Festive Parent’. Come to think of it, he’ll only fully meet the high standards of corporate correctness when he gets rid of the kids on his knee and the white beard to become ‘Seasonal Person’. After all, he/she needs to appeal to every single buyer on the planet.
Apparently unconnected, we’ve seen corporate induced climate change destroy many a white Christmas. The ‘good’ news is that it’s done wonders for sales of fake snow, tinsel and white lights. Is it really coincidence that the takeover has gone hand in hand with polluting the Earth? Is climate change part of some evil plan to make us buy more? Hmmmm!
Rant over. Sorry about that, but I do feel a whole lot better.
Finally, here’s my Christmas message.
Christians
Reclaim Christmas as your own and don’t give in to corporate correctness.
Everyone else
Relax, have a good time with your family and party (Christians – you can party too if you want)
Find your own way to celebrate Christmas (or not)
PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE!
resist the pressure to ‘Do’ Christmas the Corporate Way
Happy Christmas Everyone!
Similar Posts:
- Surviving Christmas
- Expressing gratitude: with meaning
- A Gift To The World
- Language of love
- In search of honesty
- Letting Go, Moving On
Now that’s a good encouragement in the right direction!
Christmas is more about debt then anything these days…
Ian, this is so much in accordance with what I (and thousands out there) keep observing. It is a complete slavery to the religion of consumerism. I hope the recession hits this part really very hard. At least one good thing about the recession.
ON the other hand, this year I feel completely bulletproof in this regards. Perhaps it is because I have worked up to a couple of days ago almost non-stop, not being able to see anything. Perhaps it is because now, when I don’t work and my wife has been abroad for two weeks, I barely go out of the house, just enjoying the peace and the quiet indoors. Perhaps it is because I don’t watch TV and am not being bombed with all the X-mass commercials. I don’t know, kids and friends do remind me that there is this Christmas Godzilla roaming around the country, but I just don’t see it and have not bought even one single gift or any sort of Christmas musts. It is a bit weird, but I feel like this is all going on somewhere far away.
It feels like being in a warm, dry and cosy house while there’s a storm raging outside.
Happy Christmas to you too, Ian!
While I agree with you Jade about “Christmas is more about debt…”, let me please re-phrase Jade’s comment by saying, “Christmas is ALL about our debt to Jesus Christ our Savior. Please don’t think about our debt to other people cause those are nothing compared with our debt to Jesus…”
Jade. I agree … paying for Christmas with financial debt is one of the many negative consequences of buying the Corporate idea of Christmas.
Robert. I’ve shut myself away a couple of times over the years. They’ve been some of the more enjoyable Christmases I can recall. Escaping to the cozy inside while the storm rages outside. Nice picture you paint!
Aldhis. I don’t consider myself a Christian, but I thank you for sharing your view! I’m guessing you’re wanting to reclaim Christmas to it’s rightful place? If only there were more like you, then we could ALL enjoy Christmas by making it what we individually want it to be.
Hi Ian,
This message cannot be heard enough – let’s get back to what Christmas really should be about – time together with family and friends. Time to take a break from the normal day-to-day activities to reconnect with those who mean so much to us.
Having kids, I see this commercialized Christmas more prevalent each year – I want this, I need that, spend, spend, spend. If we’d allow it, any real meaning to Christmas would be completely gone in favor of more stuff.
Rant appreciated…
Ian:
I think of Christmas as an extension of Thanksgiving. Starting with Thanksgiving I focus more on what I am thankful for and reflect through to the Christmas season. I try to be grateful on a daily basis but really focus during this “my spiritual time”.
Last year in a span of 30 minutes my Christmas went from the worst Christmas ever to the BEST Christmas ever!
Life support was removed from my 11 month old grandson on Christmas Eve, when Mommy called me at the crack of dawn I heard the most wonderful goo goo gaa gaa I have ever heard.
It was the best Christmas EVER. no “presents”, no wrapping paper..
I have never “credited” Christmas anyway and I do even less in terms of commercialism as the years go by.
My grandson is almost 2 yrs old and this will be the 2nd best Christmas ever. He is a one man wrecking machine and I can’t wait.
Lance … I appreciate the encouragement to rant. I know I’m ranting to the converted, but it does help once in a while. Also helps I’m not the only who gets disturbed by these things.
Dee … we don’t have the luxury of thanksgiving over here so we have to rely on Christmas as the main time of year for celebrating together. Your story of last Christmas wonderfully proves my point … the best gifts are not those that can be bought with money. Enjoy your time with your kids and grandkids. I know you will!
Ian,
Being a non-Christian, I stopped by not to make any point on how it shall be and how not. But what made me stop and follow the rant is my appreciation for people who keep their discretion to choose to do things the way they feel should be and not be compelled to do what everyone else keeps doing; more importantly what the ‘corporate culture’ binds them with onslaught of consumerism. But its not just Christianity or Christmas-we too, wherever we are, get more overwhelmed with concern if we might be labeled. Kudos to your point of conviction.
Pushhyarag … sorry it took a couple of days for your comment to appear. My anti-spam system put it into my spam folder and I only just spotted it and ‘de-spammed’ it immediately. Computers still don’t know everything!
I agree, and I think the masses creating the following ‘herd’ has caused more damage in history than those going against the herd. We (as a species) seem to have a knack of following bad ideas! Hopefully we’re learning though! Ian
You are right the blatant commercial pressure as you call it is overpowering. In India I have seen this pressure change the way we celebrate our old and new festivals. For example, say valentines day. In the past ten years a cards and gifts company, through its advertisements, has completely changed the way young people celebrate this. Even the more traditional local festivals have taken a completely new hue.
You are right there has been an acceleration towards us adopting these things in the recent years.
Hi lvs .. good to see you over here! And welcome. I find it interesting that you feel the commercial pressures even in India. And just how powerful the advertising industry is! Thanks for sharing this. Ian