Becoming a Scrooge

In today's blog, this being Christmas-Eve Day, I want to ruminate around how our Holiday's, originally acting as milestones in our lives, have changed over recent time.

Those Holidays which are considered, "sacred" are the ones most widely acknowledged through celebrations, and they carry the authority of one's church affiliations. Ignored is the fact that many of these are arbitrarily set dates which are actually over-layers of ancient folk rituals, marking the passage of time--solstices, equinoxes, spring, fall, etc., etc. Each of the worlds religions have set aside particular dates which are to be observed in certain ways.

The root words for "holiday" are actually, "holy day."

Thesaurus.com gives synonyms for "holiday" as, "anniversary, break, celebration, day of rest, feast, festival, festivity, fete, few days off, fiesta, gala, gone fishing, holy day, jubilee, layoff, leave, liberty, long weekend, recess, red-letter day, saint's day, vacation."

Traditionally, these days were and are frequently accompanied by allowing people to stop their normal activities to play and relax in various ways.

I suspect that, up until the Industrial Revolution, such celebrations were mostly private and/or local affairs. With the advent of mass production and the need to sell merchandise, the deliberate effort to create demand for their products intensified. The best example of this, of course, is the taking over of Christmas as a rationale to buy merchandise. The acknowledgement of this is the, "Black Friday" phenomenon. The name is said to signify the fact that shoppers on the Friday after Thanksgiving put retailers in the black for the year.

On top of this has developed the phenomenon of the most recent, "must have" items, which has resulted in people, including children, killing and being killed in the process of the theft of that item.

Preceding this phenomenon was the Barbie Dolls craziness. Cabbage Patch Kids Dolls, invented in 1978, is the earliest memory I have of the phenomenon which now exists, that verges on insanity, around Christmas to obtain a particular have-to-have item. This Christmas, a third of a century later, are the following reports:

Women trade punches over Air Jordans...
Pandemonium as shoppers race for shoes...
Cops pepper spray mob...
Brawl...
Gunfire...
They Can't Wait, They Break Into The Mall...

It has long been my opinion that the, "classic" Dickens' tale, A Christmas Carol, which instilled Ebenezer Scrooge into the American consciousness, has been dramatized and otherwise continues to be presented in most years, with the underlying purpose of instilling the idea that anyone who does not willingly participate in the current madness of this season is a Scrooge.

For quite some time, I have opted out of this madness by mostly creating the gift items I have given at this time of year, to the point that, this year, I have almost opted out entirely.

Thus stating, I end this Christmas blog.

Shirley Gallup