The beauty of consumerism

A different take on holiday shopping

I grew up in a house where Christmas morning meant thoughtfully wrapped presents piled high at the foot of the tree. Each year I woke up hours before dawn on December 25th, frantic with excitement. Every ten minutes, in between racing downstairs to peek at the stockings filled by a generous Santa, I’d pester my parents until the glorious moment when they deemed we could pile into the living room and dive under the tree.

As a parent I’ve been a little more curmudgeonly. We usually have some variation of a tree (one year it was a tree picked up off someone’s lawn who was throwing it away with various other household items, another year it was a wreath on sale on December 24th that we mounted on a quickly homemade stand) and presents that are sometimes boxes of cereal wrapped up to look far more exciting than they really are or random things (a water bottle, some toy cars) from the Salvation Army down the street. We usually throw in a “real” present or two (this year the big one is tickets to Hamilton - my kids don’t read my essays so no worries about spoilers) but overall my resistance to consumerism makes me a bit of a grinch when it comes to giving gifts and holiday shopping in general.

Though I inevitably end up at the mall for that last thing at Christmas I feel upset doing so (unlike my teenage years when I loved nothing more). I look around and see a kind of Biblical den of robbers where avaricious and insatiable people are driving our planet to the brink of destruction with their appetites for disposable plastic garbage (like I said, I’m a grinch).

For some reason, a recent gift exchange altered my lens on the whole thing. It was at my daughter’s ballet performance of the Nutcracker that a bunch of us parents were given cameo roles in as party guests. During intermission, one of the moms told us she’d bought presents for our Nutcracker daughters that we were to give them after the show, an annual tradition of giving a token of appreciation to the girls for their efforts as well as a nod to the role we were playing as their stage parents. I looked at the presents - some nutcracker ornaments bought in bulk, along with plenty of wrappings and accessory packaging - knowing all would end up in the garbage sooner rather than later and felt my usual disheartening sadness and disdain for our society’s Christmas shopping habit (grinch again).

But this time, after that reaction arose, a new one popped up. I suddenly saw the generous impulse that generated these gifts. These gifts represented so much that is wonderful - the desire to give the children something to be excited about and see their faces light up. The desire to thank them for their long practice hours and dedication to the performance. The desire to somehow make tangible the love we felt for the entire endeavour.

It made me realize that there is immense beauty behind our consumer drive. All these plastic toys, clothes or electronics - they are just material symbols of our love for one another. Our wish to create more joy in the world. Our gratitude for our children, our family, our friends, neighbours and teachers. And our appreciation of beauty - we want beauty around ourselves and others and so we search for it, wrap it up and attempt to give it to one another.

This means that, rather than looking at our economic system of consumption as the product of human greed, it could actually be looked at as the product of love. Of course we are free to change our way of gift giving if we want (there are a million and one ways of expressing love and creating joy that don’t involve shopping), and rather than judging like I have done, we can see the love that is behind the crowds at the mall. It is a much kinder way of looking at the world and to me opens the possibility to transform our beautiful human impulses into something more creative and healthy for our world if that’s what we decide we want to do.

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it, and Happy Holidays to you all!