Date posted: November 17, 2007 - Saturday
Title: Now you’ve gone too far
Current mood: pissed off
OK, now I'm pissed off.
I used to love Christmas. Even when I had very little money, I looked for the best things I could get for the people I loved; family, that special lady and friends. I got great joy out of finding the "perfect" thing for those I would buy for.
There was a time when I baked dozens and dozens of cookies, found some special thing to pack them in and gave them to friends as a Holiday treat. I think it got as high as almost 100 dozen one year.
A lot of that has changed in the last few years. Both of my are parents dead. My brothers and sisters are involved in their own families for the most part. All of us getting by, but not well enough off to buy things for all the ones we would like to. No special lady in my life.
All that aside, I took at least a neutral attitude towards Christmas in the last few years.
But not this year.
In addition to a lack of funds, and no one special to think about treating, I have finally had it with the extreme commercialization of what started as a spiritual Holiday. Even if it had progressed more to a time for family and friends, the rank commercialism has finally overtaken those few remaining admirable sentiments.
It's bad enough the Christmas ads start on television right around Halloween. Damn it is two months away at that point!
But what finally pushed me over edge is the constant screaming in television commercials the 'only' gift can really give is a car. Yep, the automobile has become the symbol for Christmas.
Well, screw you Detroit, and Japan, and Korea and whoever else thinks I should celebrate the Holiday by buying a new car either for myself of someone else.
I have been watching more commercial television this year (at least since the new season started in September) and that means I have been exposed to the hideous commercials that plague the airwaves. The drug company ads are bad enough, but the car commercials take the cake. (or the booby prize - or something.)
Automobiles these days cost about the same as what my parents paid for their first house. Hell, some of the models cost more than the house I am living in now was when it was purchased. How in the hell can you equate that expense as the "thing to do" at Christmas?
Have we become so greedy and jaded as a nation and a culture that we will fall for this hype? It's bad enough retailers look to the Christmas season as the make-or-break time of their year. Do we now have to think of this Holiday as the season to "make" the year for the people who sell big-ticket items?
Well, not me.
