Posted on 11/25/2011 1:27:16 PM PST by NYer
I confess, I despise “Black Friday.” I hate the way consumers are urged to haul their Thanksgiving-exhausted selves out to stores — away from family members who have often traveled some distance to come together — so they can surrender their human dignity or assault the dignity of others in order to snag a ten-dollar sweater and a waffle-maker for $9.99.
And I hate the way consumers go along with it.
I hate the way the mad buying and bad behavior is attached to Christmas — the coming of the Christ was meant to set us free, and yet the over-commercialization of “the Holidays” feeds our greed and tethers us to our possessions in a way that can only weigh us down, more firmly, to earthly concerns.
We are not released, only further encumbered.
And am I the only one who, each year, finds the Christmas commercials less ingratiating and more off-putting? “The season” has only just begun, but already I can’t stand the commercial where a son travels through snow to see his parents, only to find an empty house, because his Boomer parents — not interested in welcoming him — have sneaked out the back and taken his car for a spin? “Click!” The channel changes every time that commercial comes on.
She’s not writing specifically about Christmas, but in her column this week on Patheos, Elizabeth Duffy examines the emptiness of a life too full of things:
It’s time to admit that just as my kids don’t play with the wooden toys I’d prefer them to play with, I don’t wear half my clothes; I’ll never read half my books; and I don’t bake specialty cakes. And yet, over the years I have accumulated an outrageous number of artifacts for a multi-faceted fantasy life that no one in this house actually lives.
Accumulating all of that stuff — it actually creates distance between our real selves and what we think we’re supposed to be, as dictated to us through advertisers and trends. Buy these $400 shoes and you will be happy; imagine yourself walking down a runway in this dress (that no one can actually wear unless they’re built like an adolescent boy) and it will mean something to you. Really, it will.
But it never does. Because things are just things. They don’t add to your wisdom; they don’t make you a better or kinder or happier person. If you give them your love, they won’t love you back.
As Elizabeth writes:
Because I can afford them, I’ll buy five pairs of jeans in search of the one perfect pair. I may only spend twenty bucks, and have five pairs of name-brand jeans, but who needs them? Who can store them? Who has the lifestyle to support five pairs of name-brand jeans? Not me. And to be real, I probably have three times that, because I have my normal jeans, my pregnant jeans, and my fat jeans wardrobe. Also a skinny jeans wardrobe, just in case.
So there, I have clothed myself, and all my potential selves, on a dime. Yay me.
I used to make my peace with “Black Friday” and the excesses of “the season” because I considered that even the bad behavior was rooted, ultimately, in love; that people were acting like loons over “things” because they were motivated by their love for their families. But that’s not convincing me, any longer.
Each year, I find myself less willing to take part in any of this, less persuaded that I must go out and buy “things” for people who already have more than enough of everything, because somehow this is supposed to demonstrate my love. “Things” mean love.
Well, I’m not doing it. The littlest kids are getting gifts (small ones; hello chess sets!) — and everyone else is getting homemade cookies or Monastic soaps, cremes and candies — high-quality “things” that are quickly used and gone, and whose purchase helps sustain houses of prayer — or books that can actually change people’s lives by helping them to find a measure of true comfort and joy, those two genuine gifts of Christmas. The parish outreach will get the bulk of our Christmas fund.
Advent begins this weekend, and it should be a time of quietening-down, of expectation born of introspection and prayer, and yet those straining to hear the voices of prophecy and heralding angels hear only “buy, buy, buy!”.
Somewhere between the excesses of the Occupy Wall Street crowd and the excesses of the Black Friday Shoppers, there is balance and reason. But increasingly, our culture can only swing between the two extremes.
The ride is making me sick. I want off.
The only thing that bugs me is that they take a lot of useful stuff off the shelves at this time of year to make room for stupid stuff like red and green mittens.
We are having a bit of indian summer here today, I have roses blooming and if I were to go to walmart today to get some trimmer line for the weed whacker, there would be none to be found.
I refuse to participate in any coerced shopping events. I’ll do what I usually do, wait until three days before Christmas and then panic.
Love it!
I hate black ice.
I made the mistake of visiting Canada on Boxing Day a couple of years ago. I’d forgotten, because we don’t celebrate it here. What a madhouse! It took three hours at the border crossing to get back to the states.
Yup, same here. Can't say I have ever gone shopping on a Black Friday. Nothing would get me to one of these Thanksgiving night at midnight events.
Excerpt:
. . . capitalism - the word and the concept - was the brainchild of Karl Marx. As well as offering an “-ism” opposite his own -ism, it describes a rigid class society in which one class possesses the means of production, the other nothing except its labor. The latter class is called “The Proletariat” who, as Lenin declared, can lose nothing but its chains when it rises against the oppressor.
This is not the place to argue whether capitalism was the appropriate way to describe certain European societies. The point is that owning things has always been open to Americans. The moment you buy one share of stock, you part-own “means of production,” not to mention owning your home and arriving at your place of work in your own automobile - a very American image.
America never had a proletariat.
In that case, America could not have been a capitalist country.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has redefined capitalism after Marx, and it is inappropriate to use a word whose meaning is different from what the speaker has in mind.
Perhaps what we have in America is best described as a free-enterprise system.
(snip)
- Balint Vazsonyi -
http://balintvazsonyi.org/shns/shns100202.html
I don’t do it, but I think it’s great.
As far as being exhausted and leaving family, the author has obviously never been in a family like mine. Nothing gets a bunch of women excited like running out and getting a great sale.
People I know get up and get out, and have a great time together. They plan for it together, arrange things together, pile in the car and coordinate the running. They come home with piles of stuff, excited and talking and ready for lunch.
There is something inherently conservative and capitalist about getting out and getting great deals, and saving money!
I think it was last year, maybe two years ago, when I went on a Black Friday late morning to the neighbourhood Home Depot (yes, these places are more neighbourhood than 7 Elevens these days) to get some chingaletta, saw the line to the register of 40+ toy hunters, and though the chingaletta was still on the shelf, I said “frack it!”, and left.
Capitalism, yes. Bravo! But I´d rather stay home in my pajamas all day.
“I did find a couple of good online deals today...”
You are such a TEASE! We won’t be scrooges and tell anyone... so what are the good deals you found?
It’s not for me. My wife has gone to bump elbows with the masses. I think it’s nuts.
I can do that. But I have a problem. My bottle of rum is larger than my carton of eggnog. :-P
People trampling each other to death for made-in-China toasters and conservatives have no problem with it because it’s “capitalism”...
There are no toasters made in the USA anymore
http://madebyyankees.com/2008/04/20/still-no-toaster-made-in-usa/
The only problem with Capitalism is it tends to create too few capitalists.
Oh but that cheap cheap toaster will sure as hell have a lot of hidden costs further up the road.
That ride is ... America?
We can comment on it, can boycott it, but we can’t stop it.
Aquisition is what drives the country’s economy.
Capitalism is fine, but this has become a media-exploited freak show.
I read the European press, and all over the world they are reporting the incident with the woman who pepper-sprayed her competitors and telling their readers how many Americans were trampled during the Black Friday event.
The best thing a store could do for its future is to announce that it won’t do this. These loss leaders probably don’t make them that much money anyway, and if they just open at 9:00 am on Friday with a few specials and scattered reductions, they’ll probably make more.
We look like the Muslims going around gashing ourselves on the head on whatever their idiotic moloch holiday is where they do that.
I had to go to Walmart this morning for basic groceries. The only difference between this and any other weekday morning was more school-age children with their parents, since public schools were off. Everyone was as polite and cheerful as always ... I live in a nice place!
Petsmart had dog beds half-off, but that was still do much when the dog doesn’t *really* need a new one.
Well said.
God bless!
I will always remember that scene in “They Live” when he puts on the glasses and sees the money is actually printed with “This is your God!” but you couldn’t see it without the glasses... except subliminally.
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