HERALD EDITORIAL: Give each other the gift of a hug

`Tis the season.  We know it’s Christmas because we are lining up and killing each other to buy cheap crap on sale.  It is amazing that after a year littered with suicides linked to consumer debt we are so irrationally driven to buy gifts.

There are no tidings of joy found in the abject commercialization of Christmas.  We need to spend less time substituting materialism for the true spirit of Christmas and more time actually enjoying the season.
The holidays are not about wasting five hours in Wal-Mart to buy a sweater-vest for an uncle we never see.  Hugs, people, hugs embody the spirit of Christmas.

This season brings with it the most ostentatious and aggressive marketing we see during the year.  Everywhere we are indoctrinated with attempts to prove that we need more things to define our lives and provide us happiness.

Consumption is sold to us as a substitute for reality as we attempt to prove how much we care with how much we give.  We lose more sleep deciding what to buy for whom than we spend time appreciating the recipient.

Throw some Bing Crosby on and we’ll spend an extra 15 minutes looking at porcelain unicorn figurines.
The sad thing is that as good citizens we are conditioned to spend and this season provides ample opportunity for specious gifting.

A large degree of these gifts are unnecessary.

The retailers bombard us with marketing to convince us that how much we love is highly correlated to how much we give.  Corporate America has successfully convinced us that we should wait for 18 hours in 25 degree weather to save $50 on TiVo.

So, we listen to Corporate America and spend our ass off.  This logic is illogical in a year where we watch corporation after corporation beg for a federal bail-out because they can’t run their business.

Whether we find the holidays secular, or religious, or both, we have to be able to find better advice to follow than that offered from a CEO.  All this advertising and still we can’t find the sweater-vest that defines our love for our special someone.

The gift we get this season from corporations vying for our patronage is to watch them try to get back something they already sold, their souls.  Greed brought them to self-destruction as we saw with the financial institutions after they convinced the SEC to allow them to leverage themselves 40 to one from 15 to one.

This behavior brought them to their current state, this behavior is what they sell to us and this is the behavior a large concentration of us have adopted.  If selling a sweater-vest means more to Wal-Mart that receiving it means to our uncle something is wrong.

So, as we begin to celebrate the season with our family and friends we should spend a little introspective time understanding why we give the gifts we give.

If you are short on gift ideas that actually have meaning just think a little.  The uncle could get a note in a box that he can redeem for a hug.

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=2816

Posted by HeraldAdmin on Dec 7 2008. Filed under Editorial, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Cody Kimball
Web Manager: I'm a Communication Student at WMU, a SCUBA Diver, Boater, Ordained Minister, Notary Public, Web Designer, Film Maker, DJ, and of course a Journalist. Born and raised in Port Huron, MI and a graduate of SC4. http://www.codykimball.com