Only 24 More Shopping Days ‘Til They Think up a New Reason for Shopping Days!
I’m not getting a Christmas tree this year. This is BabyDaddy’s year with the kids for Xmas, so they’ll be heading off to his place the weekend I’d normally drag myself to Home Depot to get a tree. So I’m not going to fool with it.
My friend Lisa and I admitted to each other yesterday that, for us, Christmas is actually more stress than fun. More and more every year, I feel obligated to spend tons of money on gifts, the choosing of which gives me panic attacks. I feel obligated to spend money I can’t afford on hauling the cheapest, most needle-dropping tree I can find into our tiny apartment and filling up half the living room with it. This is so that I can spend several hours searching for boxes of shiny plastic things to put on said tree, and so that I can bitch at the kids while they step on the lights and beads we’re trying to string around said tree, and so that, after the tree’s all done up, I can stare at it and feel bad that I don’t have enough money for nicer ornaments on a nicer tree.
But, hey… this isn’t going to be one of those, “I hate Christmas/Christmas is so commercial/Where’s all the spirituality?” posts that proliferate on the Internet and in newspaper columns every December. Because I don’t hate Christmas. I like it. It’s fun. And of course it’s spiritual – our society worships money.
I’m just saying that I don’t want to stress out over it anymore. So I’m not buying a tree. But I am going to put lights all over my apartment, because the lights are the prettiest part and they’re easy to do. And I’m not going to freak out over the gifts. I’m just going to make the best choices I can and have faith that people will perceive the sentiments that went into them. I’m not going to force myself to listen to crappy Christmas music, either. If I have time, I’ll make a CD of only the Christmas songs I like. If I don’t have time, screw it.
I have to admit to you that, when I read that all the stores did well on the day after Thanksgiving except Wal-Mart, I laughed. “Ha, HA!” I said. “That’s right, Wal-Mart – no one wants to insult their friends by giving them your CHEAP SHIT for Christmas!” Then, I read that the expensive stores did best of all. “What’s that, Wal-Mart? You say the ‘improving economy’ didn’t give you the profits you expected? Maybe that’s because the people who got the big tax cuts this year wouldn’t be caught dead wearing your Faded Glory jeans! Too bad, Wal-Mart. Guess you won’t be screwing the sweat-shop kids and the Mexican night stockers quite as hard this year, huh? I guess you’ll just have to wait for the tax breaks to trickle down to the lower middle class, the backs of whom you’re normally riding this time of year, huh? I guess you might not be able to buy your friends a thousand diamond golf balls for Christmas this year, huh, Sam Wal-Mart?? That’s right! YOU CAN ONLY BUY THEM NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY-NINE! Yeah! That’s right! Screw you, Wal-Mart! Merry freaking Christmas!”
But I don’t hate Corporate America. No. For some reason, I’ve been feeling this compulsion to go to Starbucks and drink a Peppermint Mocha. Isn’t that funny – that the graphic designers hired by the Starbucks Corporation have filled me with more spirit than anything else?
Every year for the past four years (since I became single and therefore controlled all the household money), I’ve done that thing where you anonymously buy gifts for some little poor kid. At all the corporations where I’ve been working, they’ve had wish trees full of poor kids’ scrawled desires.
I participate because I have to, because some years when I was growing up, anonymous gifts from better-off strangers were the best gifts I got. But, also, I like to do it, because it’s fun.
I never have a ton of money, so I always search the wishes for a little child who just wants clothes or glitter stickers or something cheap. Not GameBoys. Not bikes. Not stereo equipment. I don’t fault the kids for wanting expensive things – don’t we all? But I pick one who’s not addicted to electronics and try to buy her a good little amount of things.
So, this year, even though I make more money than I ever did, I have less to spend on Christmas. And, like every other year, I thought to myself, “Maybe I should cut back by not doing the wish tree.” But this time I really meant it. No, seriously. How could I cut back on my family and friends while still buying something for some anonymous little kid?
The Wish Tree went up in our lobby yesterday, and I just couldn’t resist looking at it. I couldn’t resist reading the little cards and trying to picture the children who wrote them and fantasizing that their wish-tree gifts will improve their lives. So I looked, and I saw that one little girl asked for “a Barns + Nobel gift certifcate.”
Aw! Come on – how could you NOT want to right out and buy her a thousand-dollar Barnes & Noble gift certificate? You could just cut back on your eating-out budget for the year. You could just work some freelance. You could just sell your freaking blood. Come on – have some Christmas spirit.
Then, this morning, I stopped to look at the tree for a little longer, and I noticed that, for the first time ever, no one had listed GameBoys or bikes. And then I finally saw that each card instructed the kids “Top Three Gift Choices (UNDER $20).”
Aw.
On the one hand, I felt sad. Poor little kids, asked to put a limit on their wishes. On the other hand, I felt grim approval. Kids are never too old or too poor to learn to be realistic, are they? On the third hand (let me borrow one of your hands, here), I felt joy. Simple, selfish joy.
Now I can afford to do the Wish Tree this year! Yay! Christmas is saved!
Because – come on, man. We all know that Christmas is really all about me.
