One thing I can always count on during this wonderful holiday season is that someone somewhere is going to try to guilt me into spending money. If it’s not on a television commercial that is concerned that my loved ones might be very unhappy with whatever choice of present I decide to give them, it’s the actual show itself where the main character will somehow be forced into a Quixotic quest to find the right present so that Christmas doesn’t turn out as horrible as every previous one that character has experienced.
But if I turn off my TV, I’m immediately bombarded by Christmas cheer on the radio. The other day, I went through my preselected channels, finding nothing but Christmas carols and admonishments about what I was buying people for Christmas. Upset at that, I turned off the radio, opened a magazine, and sure enough because it was the September issue of Girls Who Like to Do It, (or whatever magazine it was I was reading), every ad in the stupid magazine had some stupid Christmas theme that told me I was supposed to be spending money. So I walked down the street, and everywhere I went that had a cash register, including some corner parking lot that was selling trees, the topic was everything about selling me crap that I didn’t want.
I’ll let you in on a secret. I don’t really have much of a family. My parents are both deceased, my sister lives in California with her own family, and I’ve never married. My stuffed animals and I have an agreement that we don’t have to buy each other presents, so I don’t really have much in my life that concerns me when it comes to Christmas.
Except that everyone and his brother thinks I should be out shopping for people to buy people presents.
I know this is a common gripe, but Christmas has completely stopped being about the spirit of Christmas. Forget the whole stupid War on Christmas crap. We’re in full mode Buy Everything Under the Sun Because It’s Christmas mode, and it’s really annoying. You see, I actually like to shop for things for myself every now and then, but I can’t seem to do that during Christmas (which starts sometime in July and ends sometime in February) because every clerk in every store wants to regale me about all things Christmas. Some of us don’t celebrate Christmas because we’re alone.
Did you know that suicides happen most often during the Christmas season? Might that have something to do with the fact that a lot of us don’t actually have a lot going on during this seasons YET EVERYONE KEEPS REMINDING US OF IT? There are some days that if I could find a bridge high enough, I’d jump from it, if it would just get people to stop trying to instill Christmas cheer into me when I don’t have anything to be cheerful about.
CNN is no different. Just today, I was reading through articles, and sure enough there’s a self-help article on what to do when you run into a tight budget during Christmas. How about NOT buying any gifts? That’s a solution, too. If I don’t buy any gifts, I incur absolutely NO financial hardship. Yet, for some reason that’s not an option in our consumer driven mad mania of all things Christmas.
While we’re all worried about how to afford it all, we sort of forget that there are a whole bunch of people who are struggling just to put normal food on the table, regardless of the spirit of the season. Today, in Bay City, hundreds of people turned out for a food giveaway. Dozens were turned away, because they ran out of food. Meanwhile, stores are telling us to spend as much as we can on the family because we need to jumpstart the economy. Well, I’ll let you in on a secret. The real problem is not the economy; it’s the people who aren’t surviving the economy. They kind of get forgotten so we can worry about whether or not banks can recover from losing mortgage payments. If we were really thinking about our fellow citizens, Obama and Bush would have been arguing for a stimulus package that put food on the tables of starving people rather than whether or not we bailed out banks that make very rich people even richer.
If there’s a spirit of Christmas, watching for its message on a television show isn’t where you’re going to find it. I find it interesting that we keep trying to reinvent the message of Christmas with new million dollar budgeted movies when Charlie Brown really got it from Linus every year during the most succinct, fulfilling monologue ever delivered:
Linus says, “I’ll tell you the meaning of Christmas, Charlie Brown.” And Linus, who has worried over memorizing his part in the pageant, goes to center stage, asks for the stage lights, and begins to say, in that wonderful little boy’s voice, “And there were shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night, and lo the angel of the lord came upon them and the glory of the lord shone round about him, and they were sore afraid, and the angel said unto them, fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord. And suddenly there was with the angels a multitude of the heavenly hosts, praising God and saying, Glory to God in highest heaven and peace on earth god will to men.”
The funny thing is: I’m not even very religious, and that monologue gets me every time. For there are many people who often misconstrue the monologue to be strictly religious, and it doesn’t really have to be. What it delivers to Charlie Brown, from Linus, is that on that day hope was delivered where none had been before. For some, it was a religious moment; for others, it was a moment of believing that perhaps there is more to oneself than just thinking about oneself. And little Charlie Brown goes off and realizes that his little tree can be much more than just the little thing he has before him, and it becomes that much more powerful as a result of his hope and, if you wish to believe so, his faith.
Not once was it about money, greed or the perfect present.