Y'all I am NOT feeling the oncoming Christmas season. I am even less feeling the already-here Christmas season I keep encountering in stores.
US consumer culture (possibly in other countries too but this is the one I've spent the most time in) runs on hijacking our dopamine. Our entire consumer culture is about manufacturing wants and then only-kinda-just-sort-of-enough fulfilling them to keep us coming back.
Yet Christmas - and its related dead-of-winter holidays like Saturnalia, etc. - is a holiday about recovering some dopamine when the weather is getting ever colder and darker and the food supplies, which looked so ample in October, are starting to raise questions about whether they'll actually last until March or April. The *point* is that tasty foods and shiny lights and songs and gifts are supposed to give us a boost. But how the hell does that work when we're already bombarded by vast quantities of hyperpalatable calories, massive light pollution, noise so constant that nearly all my students wear noise-canceling headphones, and manufactured desires for more Stuff than we could ever need or use?
I have been asking myself this question a lot lately.
Literally the day before Halloween, I was in a National Chain Hardware Store Which Shall Remain Nameless Because I'm Not Doing Free Advertising. I picked up some cat food and then realized the shortest route to the discount daffodil bulbs was through a Christmas aisle. The day before Halloween.
Anyway, I used said aisle, which contained a bunch of ornaments. Specifically, it contained ornaments that were miniaturized versions of Beloved American Brands(TM). One of them was literally just the Velveeta package, shrunk down to ornament size.
I sent a photo of this to Gremlin with the comment "Our national culture is just 'quirk chungus who loves Brands.'"
And now I can't unsee it. It's EVERYWHERE. I overlooked it in my students, thinking it was "normal" for kids to define themselves by their Brand Choices, since I remember doing it too. My mom dressed me out of thrift stores, so I yearned to wear the Brands my classmates wore - the purple Champion sweatshirt I found in 1996 with the bleach stain on one cuff got worn nearly every day for three years, I was that starved for Brands.
But lately, I've been looking at my life generally from the perspective of, say, my medieval ancestors. And I'm realizing: not only is our desire to buy particular things (Velveeta ornaments, Champion sweatshirts) manufactured but so is our "desire" to shop at all.
Thanks to some sleuthing on my mom's part, some outstanding recordkeeping on the part of the Netherlands, and some sheer dumb luck to be the descendant of rich/influential Europeans at the right points in human history, I can actually trace back both sides of my family over a thousand years. So I'm thinking a lot now about, say, my great-great-etc. grandmothers in, say, 1226. They weren't shopping recreationally or yearning for Brands. They probably didn't even use money.
(Well, one of them ran an estate in Scotland while her husband schmoozed at court, so she probably did use money. But a lot less than one would think.)
These women did not have Brands. They didn't have aisles full of Christmas tree ornaments at Reasonable Prices. Yet they not only survived but lived long enough to produce descendants, as evidenced by the fact that I am here now, blogging this post.
If they didn't need Brands, or holiday ornaments, or holiday ornaments in the shape of Brands, I sure as heck don't.
All of which is to say that I am opting out of (consumer) Christmas.
I have decided to do a shortened version of the St. Martin's Fast. I will have my traditional Bird Meal on (US) Thanksgiving as normal, but then I am opting out of video games, eating out, Christmas music, having excessive lights on, and buying anything until the weekend of the 18th, when I will put up Christmas decorations. Then I will spend the 20th or 21st (depending) celebrating Christmas the way I have always wanted to: The Hell Alone. Going to have myself a cozy day at home where I don't have to do anything or talk to anyone. Just me and my record player and the wood stove and the cats and all the treats I haven't eaten since Thanksgiving.
My family can have the 25th as usual, but I won't have to deal with the annual disappointment that I *want* to spend Christmas doing my own thing but I am *expected* to spend it at Dopamine Brand-a-palooza (aka the annual family gift opening). I am giving the niblings each a pass to a summer experience with me (the zoo, the children's museum, etc,), Gremlin is getting socks, and no one else is getting anything.
(Gremlin is preemptively excited about the socks.)
I thought People Of My Acquaintance would think I was crazy, or maybe feel sorry for me, if I told them I am opting out of Christmas. So far, however, the response I've encountered the most is envy. "That sounds so restful. I wish I could do that" is the sentiment I hear most often.
So did I. So I did.
We need new holiday traditions. The ones we have were hijacked by capitalism's dopamine thieves ages ago. We deserve holidays that don't depend on Buying Stuff.
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