There's Something About The Holidays

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Eat My Holiday Cheer
Screw joy and togetherness. It's all about retail, just like Jesus would have wanted
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 2, 2005


Does it not feel more manic and insane this year? Is there not more commercial pressure and consumerist mania and does it not seem increasingly surreal and obnoxious and silly? Or is it all relative and it just seems more utterly intolerable because we've had 10 months to try and forget the last holiday season's odious marketing-shopping miasma?

Christmas decorations were out long before Halloween. Retailers were preparing their attack months in advance. On Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the most gruesome shopping day of the year, stores from the hellbeast of Wal-Mart to tepid ol' JCPenney to upscale shopping centers across the nation were either open all night or opened their doors at 6, 5, even 4 a.m. to accommodate dazed and bleary-eyed hordes of frothing shoppers, most of whom wouldn't know the concept of patience if it smacked their butts with a PlayStation 2, and by the way if shivering in the dark outside a Best Buy at 3:30 a.m. in frigid November drizzle waiting for a half-price deal on a cheap-ass Chinese-made DVD player isn't the very definition of self-immolating karmic torture, I don't know what is.

I shall not argue for the purity of the holidays, for some sort of utopian Christian notion that it used to be all simple and lovely and beatific and that it has now been horribly corrupted by ruthless commercial interests, because the whole damned holiday has been commercially controlled for the past hundred years and to suggest otherwise is to suck down one too many $5 Starbucks Eggnog Lattes and don the happy blinders.

And I shall certainly not argue for the sanctity of the idea that Christmas is meant to celebrate the holy and glorious birth of Christ (an iPod-free renegade mystic who was actually born somewhere around July), or the idea that we should all be taking some sort of solace in our national generosity of spirit (a generosity that only exists if you're not, you know, gay, or minority or Iraqi or Islamic or mentally ill), nor shall I even defend Christmas as a time of family togetherness, given how, for most people, getting together with family around the holidays is akin to having your fingernails yanked out by a chain saw in an ice storm, naked.

I shall not argue the benefits of buying less and using organic wrapping paper and purchasing gifts from local shops and shunning companies that support noxious right-wing agendas (that's another column). I shall not list funky alternative gift ideas to get you away from the commercial whoredom and more toward progressive sex-positive bliss and more toward helping infuriate the Christian right (ditto).

Nor it is all about some shining notion of love and the brotherhood of man, though it's certainly true that the holidays are a wonderful excuse to have friends over more frequently and have great dinner gatherings and attend suspect office parties wherein you get to see your co-workers get totally drunk and flirtatious and in wholly refreshing contexts that make them appear interesting and sexy and more fully flawed and fleshed and weirder than you'd imagined previously. And that's usually a very good and fascinating thing.

But the holidays are also the time of bitter separations, of divorces and breakups and brutal family tensions, of severe loneliness and heartbreak and a very large increase in the intake of behavioral medication. Questions of family and money and love all come to a brutish head at this time of year, relationships are tested to the extreme, amplified by the fact that winter means you're stuck inside small buildings for long periods with people you may or may not be entirely sick of.

But here's the kicker: Just because all these holiday clichés of joy and togetherness and hope don't really hold, just because they're a little more bogus than we might want to admit, must we give in so desperately, so fundamentally to the real engine of the holidays, the all-devouring retail sector? Truly, every holiday-related news story from now till January focuses almost exclusively on the holy grail that is holiday shopping, on the health of the nation as it relates to how many people are signing their paychecks over to Wal-Mart -- and doesn't that seem horribly wrong and sad?

Countless stories regurgitate sales data as if the only factor that mattered to the overall well-being of the human soul was how many Xboxes and iPods and cell phones and digital cameras and plasma TVs were moved this season, and whether you acted like a good American and added to your average of $8,500 of personal credit-card debt ($1.7 trillion total, nationally) from which most of you will never, ever recover.

Oh sure, there will be a handful of stories about charities and stories about how poorly poor people fare this time of year, all tainted and undermined by the story of how the increasingly porcine and spiritually repellent Jerry Falwell and his litter of Christian lawyers are prepared to sue (as a fundraising stunt) any media outlet or public institution that dares to dis Christmas, everyone's favorite consumer orgy, which was originally a big, meaty pagan solstice sun-god Saturnalia that the church swiped wholly from ancient fertility cults. Whoops, sorry Jer.


Given all this unholy consumerist-PR madness, you might think we are headed for some sort of breakthrough, some sort of crack or explosion or massive karmic breach, our ridiculous habits of overabundance and excess finally resulting in a terrible/wonderful sociocultural implosion that will lead us all to less gluttony and refined spiritual appreciation and better cookware. You might think.

Because here's the thing: Every year it seems as though we inch just that much closer to the edge, that much closer to the karmic realization that we long ago passed saturation, past the point where all our needs have been met and we now merely create endless mountains of new crap for needs we don't even really have, and you cannot help but feel we are caught in a mad downward spiral, spinning toward something that smells like apocalypse but tastes like chicken and feels very much like a revolution of spirit.

Maybe that's it. Maybe this idea, much like being grateful to BushCo for proving that lies and pseudo-Christianity and warmongering and fiscal irresponsibility cannot last as a national agenda, is something to be cherished. All the mad marketing and all the product gluttony, they're all merely further indicators that we are just about ready to burst, to grow up, to snap the hell out of it.

This is the nice way to think about it. This is the positive view. Let us choose it now, because the alternative is bleak and dank and dismal and to face it is to face the idea that we are all just a bunch of greedy self-serving monkeys ever lured by the shiny and the new and the spiritually empty.

And man alive, that perspective is just no fun at all. Better to ignore it completely and find your slivers and crumbs of hope and joy and relationship bliss where you may, amid the carnage and the wasted wrapping paper and the pile of credit-card receipts, and convince yourself, yet again, that they've gotta be in there somewhere. After all, isn't that what the holidays are all about?


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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.


As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin' SF Gate Culture Blog.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/12/02/notes120205.DTL