gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

xmas rant

Every year it's the same. Mr. Tweed-jacket-pipe-smoking Clever Dickie appears on the radio or TV and starts bemoaning the rampant commercialisation of Christmas.

"Gosh!" he squeaks. "I was in a shop the other day and wouldn't you know they were blaring out 'Jingle Bells' ad nauseum, much to the horror of my already-tired ears etc..."

Well, like the media organ paying his appearance fee, shops are commercial spaces. People spend more on stuff during Christmas Season. It's in the commercial spaces' interest to begin the season sooner than later.

In the old days most people worked on the farm. Farming is very labor intensive, so you had to spend most of your time there. You went to market once a week, you went to church/temple/mosque once a week, you went to the town meeting once a month. Besides that, you spent the rest of the time on the farm.

But now we live in a world where either directly or otherwise, we enter commercial spaces and stay there for several hours pretty much every day. Our lives are awash in commercial space. Private space gets smaller and smaller, commercial space gets larger and larger.

Still, Christmas is like anything else- it's as meaningful as you make it; it's as meaningful as you want it to be.

Maybe Christmas is becoming less meaningful to you- but that is not Christmas' fault. That is not religion's fault. And it certainly not the fault of the stores and the TV. You enter those spaces willingly- there's no law saying you have to turn on the TV or go into the shopping mall.

The spiritual decline of Christmas is like the spiritual decline of society- every generation for the last God-knows-how-many centuries gets to a certain age and gets their self-appointed intellectual elite to start droning on about it, funnily enough, around the same time the latter develops their own inflated sense of social entitlement.

If our Yuletide values are in terminal decline, I would say Mr. Tweed Jacket is as guilty as anybody. For him not to admit his own complicity (his paycheck is probably being paid by advertisers or some other big-money/big-power interests, don't forget) is the usual disingenuous intellectual-elite hypocrisy.

So eat, drink and have a good time. Tell Mr. Tweed Jacket to go get a life. Merry Christmas! Ho ho ho...

Posted by hugh macleod at December 25, 2004 10:18 AM | TrackBack