Eat My Holiday Cheer

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M

Fri, 2 Dec 2005 14:48:48 -0800 (PST)

FW: Eat My Holiday Cheer

 

 

Eat My Holiday Cheer

 

Screw joy and togetherness. It's all about retail, just like Jesus

would have wanted

 

- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

 

 

Friday, December 2, 2005

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/12/02/notes120205.\

DTL

 

Does it not feel more manic and insane this year? Is there not more

commercial pressure and consumerist mania and does it not seem

increasingly surreal and obnoxious and silly? Or is it all relative and

it just seems more utterly intolerable because we've had 10 months to

try and forget the last holiday season's odious marketing-shopping

miasma?

 

Christmas decorations were out long before Halloween. Retailers were

preparing their attack months in advance. On Black Friday, the day

after Thanksgiving and the most gruesome shopping day of the year,

stores from the hellbeast of Wal-Mart to tepid ol' JCPenney to upscale

shopping centers across the nation were either open all night or opened

their doors at 6, 5, even 4 a.m. to accommodate dazed and bleary-eyed

hordes of frothing shoppers, most of whom wouldn't know the concept of

patience if it smacked their butts with a PlayStation 2, and by the way

if shivering in the dark outside a Best Buy at 3:30 a.m. in frigid

November drizzle waiting for a half-price deal on a cheap-ass

Chinese-made DVD player isn't the very definition of self-immolating

karmic torture, I don't know what is.

 

I shall not argue for the purity of the holidays, for some sort of

utopian Christian notion that it used to be all simple and lovely and

beatific and that it has now been horribly corrupted by ruthless

commercial interests, because the whole damned holiday has been

commercially controlled for the past hundred years and to suggest

otherwise is to suck down one too many $5 Starbucks Eggnog Lattes and

don the happy blinders.

 

And I shall certainly not argue for the sanctity of the idea that

Christmas is meant to celebrate the holy and glorious birth of Christ

(an iPod-free renegade mystic who was actually born somewhere around

July), or the idea that we should all be taking some sort of solace in

our national generosity of spirit (a generosity that only exists if

you're not, you know, gay, or minority or Iraqi or Islamic or mentally

ill), nor shall I even defend Christmas as a time of family

togetherness, given how, for most people, getting together with family

around the holidays is akin to having your fingernails yanked out by a

chain saw in an ice storm, naked.

 

I shall not argue the benefits of buying less and using organic

wrapping paper and purchasing gifts from local shops and shunning

companies that support noxious right-wing agendas (that's another

column). I shall not list funky alternative gift ideas to get you away

from the commercial whoredom and more toward progressive sex-positive

bliss and more toward helping infuriate the Christian right (ditto).

 

Nor it is all about some shining notion of love and the brotherhood of

man, though it's certainly true that the holidays are a wonderful

excuse to have friends over more frequently and have great dinner

gatherings and attend suspect office parties wherein you get to see

your co-workers get totally drunk and flirtatious and in wholly

refreshing contexts that make them appear interesting and sexy and more

fully flawed and fleshed and weirder than you'd imagined previously.

And that's usually a very good and fascinating thing.

 

But the holidays are also the time of bitter separations, of divorces

and breakups and brutal family tensions, of severe loneliness and

heartbreak and a very large increase in the intake of behavioral

medication. Questions of family and money and love all come to a

brutish head at this time of year, relationships are tested to the

extreme, amplified by the fact that winter means you're stuck inside

small buildings for long periods with people you may or may not be

entirely sick of.

 

But here's the kicker: Just because all these holiday clichés of joy

and togetherness and hope don't really hold, just because they're a

little more bogus than we might want to admit, must we give in so

desperately, so fundamentally to the real engine of the holidays, the

all-devouring retail sector? Truly, every holiday-related news story

from now till January focuses almost exclusively on the holy grail that

is holiday shopping, on the health of the nation as it relates to how

many people are signing their paychecks over to Wal-Mart -- and doesn't

that seem horribly wrong and sad?

 

Countless stories regurgitate sales data as if the only factor that

mattered to the overall well-being of the human soul was how many

Xboxes and iPods and cell phones and digital cameras and plasma TVs

(http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/250090_elecgifts29.html) were

moved this season, and whether you acted like a good American and added

to your average of $8,500 of personal credit-card debt ($1.7 trillion

total, nationally) from which most of you will never, ever recover.

 

Oh sure, there will be a handful of stories about charities and stories

about how poorly poor people fare this time of year, all tainted and

undermined by the story of how the increasingly porcine and spiritually

repellent Jerry Falwell and his litter of Christian lawyers are

prepared to sue (as a fundraising stunt) any media outlet or public

institution that dares to dis Christmas

(http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/11/20/MNGVDFRH081.DTL & hw=falw\

ell+christmas & sn=001 & sc=1000),

everyone's favorite consumer orgy, which was originally a big, meaty

pagan solstice sun-god Saturnalia that the church swiped wholly from

ancient fertility cults. Whoops, sorry Jer.

 

Given all this unholy consumerist-PR madness, you might think we are

headed for some sort of breakthrough, some sort of crack or explosion

or massive karmic breach, our ridiculous habits of overabundance and

excess finally resulting in a terrible/wonderful sociocultural

implosion that will lead us all to less gluttony and refined spiritual

appreciation and better cookware

(http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/10/26/notes102605\

..DTL).

You might think.

 

Because here's the thing: Every year it seems as though we inch just

that much closer to the edge, that much closer to the karmic

realization that we long ago passed saturation, past the point where

all our needs have been met and we now merely create endless mountains

of new crap for needs we don't even really have, and you cannot help

but feel we are caught in a mad downward spiral, spinning toward

something that smells like apocalypse but tastes like chicken and feels

very much like a revolution of spirit.

 

Maybe that's it. Maybe this idea, much like being grateful to BushCo

for proving that lies and pseudo-Christianity and warmongering and

fiscal irresponsibility cannot last as a national agenda, is something

to be cherished. All the mad marketing and all the product gluttony,

they're all merely further indicators that we are just about ready to

burst, to grow up, to snap the hell out of it.

 

This is the nice way to think about it. This is the positive view. Let

us choose it now, because the alternative is bleak and dank and dismal

and to face it is to face the idea that we are all just a bunch of

greedy self-serving monkeys ever lured by the shiny and the new and the

spiritually empty.

 

And man alive, that perspective is just no fun at all. Better to ignore

it completely and find your slivers and crumbs of hope and joy and

relationship bliss where you may, amid the carnage and the wasted

wrapping paper and the pile of credit-card receipts, and convince

yourself, yet again, that they've gotta be in there somewhere. After

all, isn't that what the holidays are all about?

 

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him (mmorford).

 

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday

on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on

the e-mail list for this column, please click here

(http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/newsletter/services/main) and remove one

article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed

(http://www.sfgate.com/rss/) and an archive of past columns

(http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/a/), which includes a tiny

photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the

street and give him gifts.

 

As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin'

SF Gate Culture Blog

(http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/indexn?blogid=3).

 

URL:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/12/02/notes120205.\

DTL

 

©2005 SF Gate

 

 

Mark Hull-Richter, U.S. Citizen & Patriot

U.S.A. - From democracy to kakistocracy in one fell coup.

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0416-01.htm

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