The Festival of Conspicuous Consumption
Originally done sometime back in '97. This has much, much less to do with the fact that I'm an atheist than it does with the fact that I become a better and better capitalist as I grow older -- and that fact bugs the hell out of me...
I have a way that I've been thinking of the Holidays lately. I've been thinking that it really isn't the Christmas Season so much as a month-long Festival of Conspicuous Consumption, the great high feast-cycle from the Church of Capital. Each holiday we pay homage in a new faith (only about a hundred-fifty years old) that few of us recognize as such, following the core gospel that Consumption is Good, for it begets Production, which makes more goods available for Consumption, which glories God, who rewards the faithful and the saved by making them richer, and ... but I digress.
Think about it: You start on the last Thursday in November by gathering and ritually consuming large amounts of ritually prescribed roasted food. Then on the Friday following Thanksgiving, you begin to shop in earnest. That's the day that the Xmas sales start; that's the day that newspapers traditionally start posting the "x Shopping Days 'Til Xmas" blurbs in the corner of Page 1. And it's a countdown from there, with all sorts of ritualistic observances. Television Xmas programming starts on Thanksgiving day, and could probably be enlighteningly mapped in subject matter and nature onto the days proceeding up to Xmas. The culmination of this orgy is Christmas Day itself, when we ritually unwrap the items consumed, display them for one another, then ritually dispose of the wrappings. (The exact process of the ritual doesn't really matter so much as that it does happen in a ritual manner in each home, more or less.) To top off the display, we once again engage in ritual consumption of large amounts of ritually prescribed roasted food (though the food choices are much broader at Christmas Feast than at Thanksgiving).
That doesn't actually end things, though. On Boxing Day, December 26, you try to make sense of the consumption ritual of the day before. You do this either by "boxing" your old consumables from years past, replacing them with the new ones ("out with the old..."), or by making one last penitential buying spree. Penitential because it usually involves spending money you don't have to get items on "sale", with the usual (faulty) rationale being that you can give them as gifts next year. Of course, no one actually gives those as gifts the next year, since by that time they are obsolete. The real purpose of these excursions is to buy with the blinders of good will removed, solely for the purpose of buying, much like saying special penitential prayers just for the good of God, and not because you've actually done anything. The purchases of this feast-cycle are not sacrifices as such, but are rather ritual observances falling outside of, and enforcing the "normal" purchase practices of the church members — which is to say, us.
And finally, how could I forget New Year's Eve? Here's how the standard version goes: After five days of rest (six if you don't observe Boxing Day in any meaningful fashion), you sally forth to finish the job with a great, cathartic rush, consuming unhealthy quantities of food and consciousness (and conscience) altering substances. And I think we all know what that's about. Those who do not normally drink, drink. Those who normally drink, drink more. We wear ritual clothing such as party hats, make prescribed noises with standardized noisemakers, do foolish things like grope in the closet with our husband's buddy or our sister-in-law (perhaps so we can have something to atone for the next day?). We stumble home and wake up the next morning in a daze, resolving to never do anything like that again (at least not until next year).
Of course, it can be better than all that. Those of us with brighter souls can cheerfully wait for the year to turn and cheer it in when it does, and then go to bed looking forward to a fresh new year wherein we can fix the things we did wrong in the last one — kind of like a new life every 365 days. Even in the best, most charitable analysis, it begins to look much like the psychohistorians' view on the third trimester of pregnancy from inside the womb: From the last Thursday in November on through the end of the year, the world becomes a progressively messier and more confusing place that we are glad to be symbolically out of, whether the escape is via a simple chorus of Auld Lang Syne, or through a trip down a dark tunnel that emerges sometime the next morning (or afternoon, depending on how long you stay underground).
And I hardly think it's an accident that the cycle begins with an essentially protestant, secular holiday — Thanksgiving was decreed by President Lincoln to take people's minds off the war, and the Pilgrim Myth constructed much later to help entrain Protestant symbolism into public life (just think about how pervasive the anti-catholic movements were in the 19th century). After all, capitalism was born of Calvinism and nurtured in the low-church reformations that spawned Methodism and Baptism. Prosperity became a sign of blessedness (just think of all those Baptist preachers with their fine homes and cars). And anyway, prosperity was after all was a reasonable byproduct of swearing off beer at breakfast, as the new protestants demanded.
So think about it. And don't forget to say your prayers as you charge up your heavenly bank account.
