Winter of Our (Dis)Content?

What a shitty Christmas… or is it?

Certainly, retailers would agree. The season of mass consumption that so many American (and European) companies use to pull themselves into the black is proving this year to be a black hole instead. Although the malls are still full (*1), people aren’t buying like they used to. Sales aren’t making projections, and the economic talking-heads are filled with gloom. Hell, even the “war on Christmas” crowd is quieter than they’ve been in years. Add that to the worsening global economy, vast swaths of investor fraud, a couple of shootouts, a crushed Wal-Mart temp and a forced miscarriage or two, and things look truly dismal this Christmas season.

Unless you take a good, hard look at our priorities and realize it’s about damned time they changed.

Now, I’m no Grinch. Pagan or not, I love the Christmas season. Regardless of the religious trappings hung around its neck, I’ve always enjoyed the festive bustle this time of year. I like the lights, the decorations, the Ranken-Bass cheesiness of it all. Hell, I even enjoy most of the music up to a certain point. To me, it’s appropriate even when it’s tacky. Looking at the real “reason for the season,” we see societies in the midst of winter who needed – and enjoyed – a reason to celebrate. Long before Catholic Churchmen decided to assign a December date to celebrate their savior’s birth (*2), people living (and dying) by Nature’s favor celebrated this season as a time of reflection, renewal, community and generosity.

This last part, however, has gotten a little out of hand.

Look, I love presents. Love getting ‘em, love giving ‘em. As anyone who’s read my oft-reprinted essay on presents (*3) knows, I enjoy both giving and receiving gifts. My family has always been a generous one, and my holiday memories involve large heaps of neat stuff under various trees. When I can, I add plenty of goodies to those piles myself; last year, with a few good paychecks in my wallet, I blew over two grand on my friends and family, and thoroughly enjoyed the process. So no – Scrooge McSatyr I’m not.

Still, I’ve worked more than my share of retail holidays, and I hope never to do it again. Each year, people and employers have grown more and more absurd in their demands. Staggering amounts of resources (natural and otherwise) go into staging an explosive and frankly unsustainable orgy of production, consumption and disposal. Trees, plastics, people, even land are used, then thrown away to feed “the Christmas Spirit.”(*4)

In a sickly ironic counterpoint to the words and deeds attributed to the Christ, people are often the first casualties of the modern “holiday season.” The appalling story of poor Jdimytai Damour and his grieving co-workers – topped off by the fatal shoot-out in a fucking toy store between a couple of gangsta assholes later that same day – underscores a litany of complaints familiar to anyone who reads the customers_suck community. The fact that Wal-Mart shoppers resisted leaving the store even after they learned that their greed had just murdered a man says all we really need to know about the nature of this insanity.(*5)

The insanity doesn’t begin or end with shopping, either. While evangelical hordes howl their pride about “the reason for the season,” corporate Scrooges & Marleys indulge in a more insidious “war on Christmas” – the one you won’t be hearing about from Bill O’Reily. For the last decade or so, the season that’s supposed to celebrate generosity and community has become the traditional time to lay off employees “for the greater good (*6).” Such annual “housecleaning” supposedly makes for a stronger bottom line at the end of the year. Fifteen years ago, this postmodern take on A Christmas Carol was an obscenity; now it’s expected that your “Christmas bonus” may be a pink slip instead. Too bad about the kids, huh? Drive yourself into debt buying those gifts, and then lose the job that was supposed to pay for them. Merry Christmas, dude.

The irony of this is sickening. Despite the Christ’s aversion to selfishness, Bebbie Jayzus Amen™ has become the patron saint of greed. A perfect example can be seen just a few weeks ago, when weeping employees at Aseptico, a local company, were laid off without warning or compensation; meanwhile, as people who thought they’d had stable jobs were escorted off the premises by armed security guards, their erstwhile CEO Doug Kazen floated off the Inner Sound on a cruise liner, schooling a well-heeled Christian group in the virtues of… wait for it… compassion and selflessness in business.

Ho, ho, ho, indeed. Where are Santa, Jesus or icebergs when you really need ‘em?

We can expect this coming January to suck even worse than usual. Low Christmas sales, combined with the insane traditions outlined above, will make for some pretty bloody bottom lines. It’s a vicious cycle, folks, and it should be telling us something.

It’s time to knock it off.

We must reassess our priorities, or they will be reassessed for us.

Two of the many elements that drew me to postmodern Paganism are the principles of cycles and consequences. The first principle asserts that Creation is filled with obvious and discernable cycles, while the second maintains that all things have consequences, usually revealed and manifested through those cycles. In contrast to the linear progression of Western science and religion (in which you start at Point A, move through Point B and finish up at Point C), these principles assert that “what goes around, comes around” – and that if you’re smart, you’ll watch those comings and goings for clues about how to live. It’s not rocket science, really – the doctrine shows up in everything from biblical psalms to Karmic sutras, folk wisdom and playground rhymes. For one insidious reason, however, the principle that “You reap what you sow” (*7) has been shunted aside for over a century.

And that reason is consumerism.

For the last 120 years or so, the human political struggle has been generalized as the battle between communisim (also called “socialism” by folks who don’t understand either one) and capitalism, the great forge of the modern world. (*8) Thing is, the greedy beast that wound up feeding on shoppers, employees and environments alike originally came crawling out of the catalogs and magazines of Victorian England (*9). For despite its age-old pedigrees, many of the “Christmas traditions” we know so well – including those piles of brightly-wrapped gifts – originated in Dickens’ London, Ground Zero for the true gospel of the 20th century: consumerism. Before then, holiday gifts were modest tokens exchanged between intimates, or displays of generosity (and bribery…) given by those who could afford them to those who could not. It was Victorian England that turned holiday gifts into cultural requirements, and linked spiritual celebration with economic necessity.

You won’t find consumerism listed as one of the soci-economic movements of the past century. Even so, consumerism is the basis for the current world economy, an economy which demands even-greater consumption of ever-greater amounts of goods by ever-greater numbers of consumers. Without a perpetual increase in consumption, however, that economy starts to tilt into the red. On paper, this concept is called “forecast profits” and “global trade.” In reality, it’s an unsustainable, unsupportable, and frankly insane form of economic suicide.

Everybody’s doing this. No nation is immune. From the theocratic sands of Saudi Arabia to the pseudo-communistic halls of Chinese government, consumerism literally makes our world go ‘round. Everyone is counting on everybody else to BuyBuyBuy in a ponzi scheme of global proportions. It’s all based on an expectation of endless consumption and endless expansion without collapse – a violation of several laws of physics and consequence. As Nature tells us, that which goes up will come down. The higher it goes, the harder it falls. And here it is, falling like winter snow.

I hope it’s not as hard a winter as it could be.

I hope we can stop being spoiled brats and learn to appreciate what’s truly important in life while we still have a chance to do so without complete disaster.

Personally, I think we’re getting a cosmic smack upside the head. As Dami and I were discussing yesterday, in a sad sort of way, the current crisis is good for us all. Because, friends and neighbors, the wheels are seriously coming off this bright little buggy of ours. When people are being shot and stamped to death in the name of Christmas cheer, we need new definitions and expectations about Christmas. When the world’s economy depends on a single holiday based around waste, it doesn’t take a Grinch to realize something’s wrong.

Whatever you call it, “the reason for the season” has got to change.

So, yeah - this is gonna be a scant holiday for me and mine. Almost everyone I know has been either pay-frozen, laid off or seriously beggared by this economic “downturn” of ours. For the first time in my 43 years, I’m not able to be with my family this year; even if I could, there’s no real money in my bank account to get them anything, thanks to a semester-long drop in enrollment at my college. Meanwhile, merchants all over Seattle are looking at their balance sheets and tearing out what little’s left of their hair because the old expectations are coming up short, thanks to the economy, the snowstorms, and a general lack of good old-fashioned cash-n-credit consumerism. The Godzillian bloat of St. Consumerism has left us all in the lurch this year, and if Little Timmy’s getting even half of his usual holiday horde, he’s the luckiest kid on the block.

And y’know what? I don’t think that’s a bad thing for us in the long run.

Like I said, I like stuff. I like giving and receiving. But if the last 10 years of writerly vagabondship have taught me anything, it’s that stuff is fleeting. It looks nice on the shelf, but when you need to pare down and consolidate, it really gets in the way. Ten years ago, I was a successful author and game designer with a great line of credit, a wonderful spouse, savings, investments, and an apartment – soon afterward a house – filled with cool stuff. Now, a decade later, almost all of that material stuff is gone, along with my former wife. What hasn’t been sold has been given away, thrown out, or stashed in storage somewhere. Aside for my book and CD collections, almost none of it exists in my day-to-day world. And y’know what? Although the divorce was painful and I still miss the person whom I had hoped was my lifetime partner, I feel no great loss over the lost stuff. Sure, financial stability was kinda nice. The stuff, though, was just stuff. I haven’t really missed it much at all. (*10)

So as yet another snowfall coats the Seattle streets, I think that yeah, we need this. It’s painful, but it’s good for us.

The current economic crash, this slide down Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the whittling of expectations from “I need everything in sight” to “I just realized what I truly need” – these are good things. We’ve all gotten spoiled in this Big Box world of ours, and it’s about damned time we recognized the need to cut back while we can still do so with relative ease.

Because, as Nature tells us, environments do correct themselves.

That’s what Winter is for.

It’s time for the earth to rest.

Maybe it’s time we gave consumerism a rest as well. Before the world we know is laid to rest by the greed we forgot to control until it was too late.

So take a deep breath, spend time with your loved ones, and let Creation’s cycles and humanity’s myths remind you what’s important in life.

Love. Balance. Sharing. And above all else, Gratitude.

For all its terrors, this Life is a gift.

Enjoy it, cherish it, and share it.



(As for Mr. Kazen: I refer you to the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. And may Bebbie Jay-zus shit in your stocking.)


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1. - Except here in Seattle, where the worst snowstorms in recorded history have paralyzed large portions of the marketplace.

2. - A date utterly at odds with the scriptural story in Luke 2:1-21… which, by the way, is the only gospel that treats the subject of Christ’s birth in any detail. The first mention of a December Christmas occurs in 354 AD.

3. - Which I’ll probably repost here later.

4. - A voracious entity of apparently Cthulhoid proportions.

5. - Don’t even get me started on the Third-World sweatshop labor used to create those endless acres of holiday junk.

6. - …of the stockholders, upper management, and other warriors of the Golden Parachute Brigade.

7. - See Job 4:8 and Galatians 6:7.

8 – This is a gross simplification, as it ignores imperialism, theocracy and fascism. Even those movements, however, have usually dressed themselves in the trappings and practices of either Capitalism or Communism since the 1800s.

9. – See Inside the Victorian Home, by Judith Flanders, to see just how much our ideas of “social propriety” have been governed by merchants who finance advertising and entertainment that tell us how dearly we need the things they produce.

10. – I do miss my former wife a LOT, and being able to travel freely, help friends out, and go to the doctor when I need to do so really didn't suck, either.