What’s wrong with the commercial Christmas?
Well, I’m lighting an artificial log in the fireplace tonight, and not just any artificial log, either. I’ll be firing up the KFC 11 Herbs and Spices log, which beat out the competition, though the choice was not an easy one. I also considered the Pine Mountain product (“scented like a fresh Alpine Forest”) and the Yankee Candle Balsam and Cedar Scented offering (“Enjoy the fragrance before lighting”).
But maybe it was the smiling face of Col. Sanders on the KFC product’s easy-burn wrapper that decided the issue. I mean, who doesn’t want a fire in the fireplace that reminds them of an eight-piece Fried Chicken Bucket?
Yes, it is that magical time of year again. “Santa Baby” is blasting out of every speaker at Target, and Peeps Marshmallow Snowmen are grinning at me on Walgreens’ shelves. Sure, some party poopers out there—somber souls who read too much Horkheimer and Adorno in their college days—are bemoaning the fact that the holiday season arrives earlier and earlier each year.
If any of your neighbors are like that, you can host an Ugly Christmas Sweater competition in your own festively decorated family room and invite them to it. It’s never been easier to find an Ugly Christmas Sweater. Not so long ago, you had to prowl the aisles at the Goodwill store, but now all the major retailers carry them—the retailers, I mean, who take the holidays seriously.
Or you can invite these killjoys along when you take the much anticipated “tacky lights tour.” Tacky lights tours are everywhere these days, at least in the better neighborhoods. As civic-minded people, encouraged by the local HOA, compete to have the tackiest displays, the competition gets fiercer every year. And costlier: You have to be pretty well off to spend thousands of dollars to make your front lawn look tacky on purpose.
Yes, this wonderous time of year has arrived. I know because I just received a heartwarming flyer from the United States Postal Service reminding me that its 600,000 employees will be “delivering infinite moments of joy all season long,” which pretty much makes it official. Especially heartwarming is the picture of the father and daughter gleefully wrapping presents—with a Christmas tree and a Hanukkah candelabrum behind them—with this thoughtful reminder: “Stay cozy while printing shipping labels at home with our Click-N-Ship service, and schedule free Package Pickup for ultimate convenience.”
I know, I know. Some people tell us that Christmas these days is too commercial. Their complaint, ironically enough, has become part of the holiday tradition. It would not be Christmas without it. Some 50 years ago, there was a real Scrooge named Christopher Lasch whose book The Culture of Narcissism caused a kind of sensation. Boy, what a grump! Lasch, who had been influenced in his early years by Marxist ideas, said that Americans had become so alienated from their work that they took refuge “in jokes, mockery, and cynicism.”
Even on festive occasions, this alienated American shows “by his actions that it’s all a game—false, artificial, insincere: a grotesque travesty of sociability.” I can only imagine what Lasch, in his obvious disdain for kitsch, would have made of the Ugly Sweaters and tacky lights tours. Would he really have found nothing redeeming in the unassuming fruitcake?
People who claim Christmas is too commercial have their own kitschy notion about what these holidays should be, and it is far more ahistorical than what they are so upset about. They seem to want to drive it all back indoors, celebrated with quiet reverence in some quaint Dickensian setting, with the family gathered round a fireplace with real logs—while the neighbors, behind their own closed doors, do the same, and mind their own damned business.
This elitist critique privileges the private over the public—the nuclear family over the community—and those who make this complaint don’t seem to understand what a 1950s notion of America they are holding up as the ideal.
Christmas was traditionally a public celebration, even at the beginning. The Three Wise Men—public figures all—went shopping before they got to Bethlehem, and I, for one, hope they took advantage of the sales.
The other day at Burlington I saw what is for now my favorite Christmas decoration of all time. It’s a 16×20 mass-produced painting called “Santa Believes.” It shows Santa gazing into a snow globe that contains the baby Jesus, surrounded by Mary and Joseph and all the rest. Or maybe it is the Holy Family gazing into a snow globe containing Santa. I’m not sure which. In either case, if that doesn’t put the Christ back in Christmas, I don’t know what does.
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