Deck the idea of holiday excess
By SUSAN AGER
DETROIT FREE PRESS
It’s that time of year again, time to stand up to the looming shadow of Christmas, look it straight in the eye and announce: “You’ll not make a chump out of me anymore!”
Then don’t let it scare you into submission.
It’s important to remember that Christmas was a simple religious holiday until about 150 years ago, when merchants realized they could make a few bucks off of it.
Handy that it fell in December, the darkest month of the year, when anxiety, depression, guilt and regret join hands to dance in our dreams.
People began exchanging small gifts to perk each other up, at a time when many had little joy in their gritty lives.
So Christmas meant an orange.
A chocolate bar.
A hand-knit scarf.
Being Americans, however, we could not allow a nice simple day to pass without plumping profits. We turned Christmas into the Hummer of holidays.
Truly, we don’t need it anymore. Every day is a holiday for most of us. No delight is rare.
Oranges rot in the back of our refrigerators. Parents throw away, with a shrug from the kids, pillowcases full of Halloween candies. We lose our scarves and gloves as casually as dimes fall from our pockets.
I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. I’m only reminding you: You don’t have to do Christmas like fake families in TV commercials or holiday specials. You can do it your way.
For inspiration, read Bill McKibben’s “Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyful Christmas” (Simon & Schuster, 1998). Yes, he means $100 total, and yes, it’d be $125 today.
Or, go to the Center for the New American Dream (www.newdream.org), whose motto is “Live consciously, buy wisely, make a difference.” Click “Simplify the Holidays.”
Or read, on www.freep.com, two earlier columns of mine. One describes my family’s giftless Christmases, embellished some years with a grabbag exchange of junk collected from around our houses.
Personal questionnaire
The other explains another family’s tradition of answering a personal questionnaire each Christmas, an idea we borrowed last year when we couldn’t be together.
I posed questions to my family both serious and silly (”Favorite addiction of 2006? What did you lose sleep over?”) and collected answers by e-mail, then copied everything along with one favorite photo from each person, bundled them all together and, whew!, FedEx’ d them in time for everyone to open and read on Christmas morning.
The most memorable line came from my 43-year-old MBA brother. To the question “I wish more people would notice my ____,” he answered “butt.” We also learned that 6-year-old Jerry wished he could learn to run faster this year, and my 76-year dad hoped to go skydiving.
We love each other. We know it. We count our blessings. And we hold on together, during the holiday gales of excess, to enjoying less more.
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services