Christmas, in Moderation

Ah, the Christmas season. A time of joy, celebration and cheer. A time of self-indulgence and senseless consumerism. A time when retail employees like myself get the pleasure of going into work an hour earlier than usual to sell jackets worth more than my month’s pay and get yelled at because we don’t have your size, ma’am, I’m sorry. No, there’s really nothing I can do. You want to speak to a manager? Okay…

Every year, North America gets sucked into eight weeks (and sometimes more) of rampant consumerism, and every year, I strive to find some balance between that and ultimate Scrooge-ism. As you might imagine, it’s hard. As my Christmas enthusiasm dwindles more and more every year, my gift-buying responsibilities only seem to grow, creating a cycle that can’t be escaped easily: hating Christmas, but still wanting to participate in the fun parts of it. It seems that you can curse Christmas and consumerism all you want, but unless you go totally cold turkey on them, you’re kind of stuck.

There’s no avoiding it: Christmas is everywhere. It’s an annoying truth that I get tired of encountering. Walking through The Bay on my way to work two weeks before Halloween, I came upon a Christmas display. And I don’t just mean a little table with a few Christmas bells and whistles – I’m talking a full-blown Christmas setup complete with a decorated tree and fake fireplace. In mid-October. I think that might be a new record.

For Starbucks lovers, the season began with the release of their much-anticipated holiday cups on November 1st. If it wasn’t clear just howanticipated these disposable paper cups were, get this: an online countdown clock was created in their honour. According to Starbucks, within the first 48 hours of the cups being released last year, they were the subject of Instagram photo posts every 14 seconds.

Of course, we’ve all heard about how this year’s cups were received. Starbucks came under fire amongst conservative Christians who were unhappy with the company’s new, minimalist, religion-neutral design. They were accused of trying to “take the Christ out of Christmas” and given loads of free publicity for doing, well, pretty much nothing. Donald Trump, who refuses to talk about religion publicly because it’s “too personal”,suggested that his conservative followers boycott the brand in what looked like a desperate publicity stunt. Just to be clear, “taking the Christ” out of Starbucks cups would be virtually impossible since the designs have never included much more than snowflakes, penguins and reindeer. No religious imagery here.

Christmas is essentially a twentieth century invention. Believe me when I say that in the time of mangers and Virgin births, Jesus was not tackling his fellow man to the ground trying to score the best Black Friday deal in Bethlehem. Our Christmas traditions are a paper-maché of European scraps, and Santa Claus as we know him today was conceived by the power of the Coca Cola company. Christmas is a commercial holiday, and hardly a religious one. I’m tired of hearing about keeping the Christ is Christmas. Those who want to celebrate a Christian Christmas should do what Jesus would have done and spend the day volunteering at a mission.

To everyone else, all I can say is this: Do Christmas like you do your Starbucks coffee… in moderation. There’s no avoiding the commercial holiday season, but you can do yourself a favour and take it in stride. You don’t have to brace yourself for Christmas. You can ditch the stressful shopping trips and think instead about a gift that’s sentimental, homemade, catered to your giftee. You don’t need to buy gifts for everyone, you don’t need to fill a quota, and – perhaps most importantly – you really don’t need to speak to a manager.

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