In The Santa Clause 3 Tim Allen’s Kris Kringle,
swallowed up by an It’s a Wonderful Life-like interlude,
briefly tours an alternative universe in which a huckster donned
the red suit rather than he and turned Christmas into —
gasp! — a celebration of materialism and plastic
trinkets. When Allen regains his sleigh, he redeems the holiday by
delivering wooden toys even Tiny Tim would have decried as
outdated. So long as children do not get what they really
want, the movie seems to say, the Christmas spirit is alive and
well.
If this ten dollar a head multi-million Hollywood lecture was
meant to refurbish Santa’s image, it did not: Last year Canadian
artist Jimmy Wright crucified St. Nick on his front lawn to protest
our “consumptive orgy.”
While few go to such lengths, decrying holiday consumerism has
become as much a beloved December ritual as placing a plastic angel
atop an evergreen or caroling. “I Can’t Believe the Mall Is Playing
Christmas Music Already,” a tuneless verse sung by those who
partake of America’s largesse but strive to maintain a sense of
moral superiority by complaining about the superficiality and greed
of everyone else while doing so, is probably heard more often now
than “Jingle Bells.” Look at the frenzy shoppers are in! Look at
the lines at department stores! It’s…it’s…crass
commercialism. The horror!
Strangely, much of this yearly cultural flagellation emanates
from the same quarters of the American political left professing
profound concern over our descent into theocracy.
No less a self-described “dedicated secular humanist” than
Barbara Ehrenreich has declared the War on Christmas over. “Christmas
is not the exclusive property of those who think God came to earth
2000 years ago as a baby in Bethlehem,” she sniffed. It’s true, if
hardly for the reasons Ehrenreich thinks, although I nevertheless
look forward to reading the biting piece of investigative
journalism detailing her time as an undercover mall elf trying to
organize the workers against a cigar-chomping, red-suited bossman
with a little round belly that shook when he laughed like a bowlful
of jelly.
One has to wonder what exactly Ehrenreich, who compared
“consumer culture” unfavorably to drug addiction in her 1989 book
Fear of Falling, expects the end result of a simultaneous
embrace of Christmas and scuttling of consumerism will be.
She and other secular humanists might hope Christmas will
eventually morph into a paid national holiday for circulating
global warming petitions and unionizing Wal-Mart workers with gift
buying limited to items praised on NPR programs and wine from fancy
vineyards. It is consumerism, however, not class war enthusiasts
and pretentious do-gooders, that has made the holiday one that
transcends, without overshadowing, our religious differences. Leave
behind capitalism with its multitude of niche markets and we will
almost certainly be left with a much more Christ-centric holiday.
Do secular humanists not remember how much they hated it when all
anyone could talk about was The Passion?
Alas, irony knows no bounds. Anti-capitalist zeal has turned
some mad-at-their-dad pseudo-anarchist types into quasi Christian
proselytizers. The anti-consumerist magazine AdBusters
(available at most major bookstores) is now attempting to expand
its Buy Nothing Day post-Thanksgiving protest into a Buy Nothing
Christmas. (As Nick Gillespie once adroitly noted, “It’s Buy Nothing Day in North Korea
every day of the year and look where it’s gotten them.”) To aid
readers in rising “above the consumer binge” the magazine provides downloadable Jesus masks to wear at the mall
as well as flyers depicting Jesus dragging his cross behind a
gift-laden shopper. “And you thought that carrying your Christmas
shopping was a burden,” it reads.
In his book Hundred Dollar Holiday Methodist author
Bill McKibben took a stab at outlining how non-Christians might
eventually come to see a commercialism-free Christmas: “This is a
birthday party for a small child born to poor parents in an
out-of-the-way place attended by cows and sheep,” he writes. If you
aren’t a Christian, it’s also a party to which you are
two-thousand years late. Who’s going to be interested in
that? Sorry, try again.
Later in the book McKibben, an anti-sales salesman who just got
you to spend twelve of your one-hundred dollar Christmas budget on
a quarter-sized ninety-five page book pooh-poohing everything from
Teletubbies to the Christmas celebratory tradition from the manger
forward, offers suggestions for livening up the party — visiting
neighbors with brownies; spreading a little holiday cheer at
churches, nursing homes and schools. All great ideas until the end:
“Even awkward places — prisons, say, or mental institutions — are
easier to visit for the first time at Christmas, song sheet or
wreath or stocking in hand,” McKibben adds, with the innocence of a
man who has never spent Christmas in either a prison or mental
hospital.
SUCH IS THE BIGGEST OBSTACLE facing the anti-consumerist crusaders.
The alternative they present, like Tim Allen’s wooden toys in
Santa Clause 3, simply is not very appealing. Take, for
example, New American Dream’s list of gifts to “Simplify the Holidays.” Some of these
items should not be special gifts at all (phone calls to elderly
friends, candlelit dinner with significant other, donations to soup
kitchen) while others are just hopelessly lame (jigsaw puzzle
followed by family gin rummy tournament) or overbearing (renewable
energy credits).
And if your child is actually satisfied with brown paper bag
puppets, permission to “wear pajamas under your coat to the movies”
and knitting lessons instead of mall swag, call their guidance
counselor. There’s a fairly good chance they’re having trouble
making friends at school. Homeliness isn’t the virtue it once was, unfortunately.
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article
on the New Grinches “pushing econ friendly gifts. “I wanted to
connect through the gift giving tradition,” a woman told the paper.
“I also wanted to communicate my own deeply-felt environmental
conviction.” Ah, but those of us who buy gifts for people based on
their preferences are the selfish ones, right?
And what do the anti-consumerists hope we’ll do with all the
spare time generated by eliminating this pesky gift exchanging
time? (Besides knit and play gin rummy, of course.) Argue! Both the
ACLU and Sierra Club have set up websites to
help you rub your loved one’s noses in their ignorance. When Uncle
Bert complains about Al Gore’s Nobel, the Sierra Club advises, you
tell him the “facts presented by Gore speak for themselves,” ask
him why he’s afraid to see the movie, and then offer to “snag the
DVD tomorrow.”
Sounds heavenly, no?
IN THE END, THERE are worse crimes than buying someone you love
something they actually want. Lest we forget, the first good act
Ebenezer Scrooge carried out after his terrifying night with the
three ghosts in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was to
hire a boy to go buy the Cratchits the “prize turkey” from the
Poulterer’s.
“What, the one as big as me?” the boy asks, taking off quick as
a shot when Scrooge promises him a shilling to retrieve the bird,
half-a-crown if he can do it in less than five minutes. Thus does
the crass pursuit of profit, goods and services pollute even the
penultimate moment of one of the most beloved Christmas tales.
Granted, were the Buy Nothings to succeed this year, it would be
amusing to watch America’s Class Warriors seize on lower holiday
sales reports as proof positive legions of Bob Cratchits in John
Edwards’ Other America were being denied holiday cheer by the onset
of the Bush Depression. Perhaps compromise is possible. We could
all agree to don festive red and green cilices while we shop. Let
them cut deep when we reach for a bargain. This way we could be
legitimately miserable even in the midst of the good fortune to
find ourselves by accident of birth in such a privileged land.
American Spectator Contributing Editor Shawn Macomber is writing a book on the Global Class
War.
