Except for the occasional Scrooge out there, or if you don’t celebrate it, we all love Christmas. So the question is, why are we writing about it in the middle of November?
If you’ve been to the Stone Road Mall since Halloween, or any mall for that matter, you may have noticed the gaudy snowflakes, Christmas lights and fake snow that have replaced the equally trashy Halloween decorations that so recently flooded our shopping spaces and our periphery.
Most likely, Santa’s reindeer are still lazing around the North Pole while we hustle about in anticipation of the Christmas season. Yet the ground remains brown, cracked and mud-ridden with the decaying leftovers of fall. And while some of us eagerly await the first quilt of snow, others refuse to give up the highly inappropriate summer attire.
Whether you’re the former or the latter, you’re most likely being overwhelmed by Christmas in some way or another. Christmas TV episodes start airing and radio jingles advertise the latest super transforming multi-purpose chainsaw-shovel for dad. Even our campus cafeterias start pulling out the cheap wreaths and red satin bows, because I obviously want crushed candy canes on my pasta and my sandwich dripping with tinsel.
Sure we all love it when they bring out the festive coffee cups– the snowman print that we love to drink from but feel no remorse in tossing away– but where do we draw the line? Is there such thing as too much Christmas?
Enter capitalism and consumerism, the Jacob and Robert Marley of the holiday season.
Through our mass consumption of Christmas gifts and the atrociously dense candied fruitcake, we drive the capitalist economy. But there are those who don’t contribute to this money-grab, those who will go without this holiday season. If the cash-strapped CSA food bank is any indication, there are many people, including many students, who will not drown in horse-sized stockings and pickled mini-onions.
In some malls, Christmas trees bear paper tags representing children who won’t receive the My Little Pony Dream Mansion, or perhaps any gifts at all for that matter. Citizens are given the opportunity to take a tag, with the intent of returning it with a gift for a child of a certain age and gender– and what’s a more real display of Christmas than this? And not just more real then the Christmas trees the tags hang on, but real in the sense of the true meaning of the Christmas spirit. Sure we all give gifts to our loved ones (who are most likely just as well off as we are) but are we big enough to ask Santa for one less sweater-vest in exchange for a gift for a child that we’ve never met and probably never will meet?
I think we are.
If capitalism can kill the Christmas buzz the day after they make a killing on Boxing Day and we sell out to New Years crap, alcohol included, then imagine what a buzz kill it would be to wake up as your six-year-old self and realize that Santa forgot to stop at your house; that in fact, Christmas didn’t come at all this year.
It’s so easy to pick up one extra gift and leave it under the tree in the mall.
This year Guelph raised the most amount of money for Trick or Eat out of any university in Ontario. If we all bought one gift for one child, that would be 18, 000 less children who’s house Santa didn’t miss.
Christmas is all around us, and it’s barely the middle of November. Dollarama brought out their Christmas knick-knacks in August (that’s not an exaggeration). At least in the States, stores have to wait until after Thanksgiving to bring out the eggnog scented candles and the porcelain squirrel-riding-a-sled hand soap dispensers. In Canada, there is no line. We need to draw it ourselves.
Spreading the Christmas cheer and competing for most obnoxious lawn decorations– people with giant blow up snow globes on your lawn, I mean you– are two different things.
Hold off on putting up the Christmas lights this year until the real countdown to Christmas begins. Or bring out the Christmas decorations in increments and make it last a little longer than the one-night Christmas buffet we share with our families.
Sing away to J. Biebs’ new Christmas album all you like, but don’t shove it down my throat. I’m holding out until December when the Christmas season actually begins to bust out the Christmas tunes. And I’m gift-wrapping my copy of Under the Misltetoe for a child who won’t get one otherwise.
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