Season's Greetings
As a non-Christian born and raised in a country without predominant Christian population, my view of Christmas is incredibly distorted. As a child, it was an occasion of envy. What do you mean you get presents from everyone every year? And by default. Without having to ace the exam, be a valedictorian, something. How cool is that?
And what is this Advent Calendar thing? You're telling me you don't just get a present on Christmas Day, but the days around? Whoa.
For some reason one of my earliest reading materials was a children's retelling of A Christmas Carol, and through this book I learned that Christmas was probably less awesome if you were poor. Regardless, when not getting anything was the default, getting anything at all was good enough, right? Afterall, the most important thing was the spirit of the season. At least it was still a holiday as long as school was concerned, and the TV stations would have some pretty good movies on offer.
I grew out of that in a year or two, because our school and neighborhood would have some kind of gift exchange events to foster community building and you would predictably get the lamest trinkets ever. I stopped going as soon I was old enough to bail out. I sort of imagined Christmas gifts everywhere to be just as lame, it was all symbolic and perfunctory anyway. My other exposure of Christmas was all these American movies, but everyone knew that American movies were all comically exaggerated.
At school, Christmas was a rather austere event. I attended a longstanding Catholic institution known for its discipline and despite being rather fancy for the time (read: filled with children of old money) it was also harboring many poorer children of the parish attending on scholarships. We would have a small Christmas tree in the hall every year, decked in handmade decorations (usually from the elementary division) and surrounded with cardboard scenes of nativity. Everyone wore uniforms, and we were prohibited from bringing excessive items to school. Aside of occasional showings of shiny backpacks and stationeries, you wouldn't realize how different home life was for everyone (at least until the end of middle school, where many group assignments would bring you to people's homes).
I read Gift of the Magi in middle school thanks to TVTropes and Project Gutenberg. It was quickly my favorite short story and stayed at the top for a long time. All I understood from Christmas gift-giving so far: a nice thing to do if you could afford it, extra nice if someone could be thoughtful about it, but probably nothing too grandiose.
When I was in high school, internet access and laptop ownership were becoming common. For many teenagers in third world countries, it means onslaught of American and European media available on demand. I was especially curious about foreign cultures, consuming stories after stories after stories. The internet let you be a fly on the wall for just about anything you want to know. It was amazing.
And from then on I watched time marching forward. Along with it, Christmas gift-giving got bigger, uglier, crazier, starting even earlier every year. Late-stage capitalism is truly something. Over the years, I learned how high-stake it could be. How a token of gratitude morphed into a show of ostentatiousness. That the people involved could be so entitled to demand that everyone would give them exactly what they wanted (and these wishlists are often unreasonable) but the environment around them allowed them to grow up with that entitlement. That no one seemed to be thankful about anything.
Corporate weaponizes social media to turn every single occasion into an excuse to spend money. Buy. Buy. Buy. To turn everything into a game of acquisition. To equate love with a show of extravagance. To make material wealth the only barometer of success while we keep getting deprived of the most basic needs: clean air, access to water, adequate food.
I'm not even Christian, but I can't help but feel a little sad.
This year, I see a surging popularity of posts suggesting that the tradition should be done away with. No buy movement shows up whenever I go. The pressure is intense, what do I know? Safely locked out of the loop, a mere observer trying to make sense of something other people were born and shackled with. A little insufferable centrist I am, I think going too far either way is no good. Keep it humble, keep it homemade, keep it intimate. We shouldn't have to kill nice traditions just because capitalism ruins it for us.
Have a Merry Christmas.