Photo illustration: The Globe and Mail. Source Images: Istock
Michael Harris is the author of All We Want: Building the Life We Cannot Buy.
One Christmas when I was nine or so, my mother took me aside after all the gifts had been torn open and asked, “Happy?”
I nodded, unsure where this was going.
“It’s just that I always wonder with you, Michael. It never seems to be enough.”
It was the 1980s – “enough” was the enemy. I grew up in the heyday of mindless shopping and obnoxious advertising. I was a spoiled child in an affluent suburb; my friends and I knew that contentment was not the point. Christmas was about the next gift, and the next. Christmas, to such a child, meant a spree of consumption through which, if one’s parents were very lucky, they might prove their love.
I was not alone in this immodest conviction. Our consumer culture was by then a single absorbing story that invested material goods with magical powers. In a sense we were all children then, blithely delighted by the haul that the 20th century had dumped at our feet. But the decades crawled by and splurging turned to nausea. We grew up, we began to ask ourselves: “Happy…?”
And then came a plague – forcing some of us to invent new proofs of our love. During the first pandemic Christmas, Nielsen discovered a spiking interest in homemade, personalized gifts. A year of baking sourdough and canning pickles culminated in a holiday brimming with knitted scarves and whittled ducks. Etsy and Pinterest reported floods of searches for the artisanal and craft-based. We had been living so long in extremis – and often in isolation – that we were desperate for ways to properly connect. We wanted to invest actual time, thought and labour in our gifts. We wanted our loved ones to know we had given them something of ourselves.
The change was broader than the Christmas season. My husband turned 40 and – since a proper party was impossible – I had all his friends send me the name of a song that reminded them of Kenny. Listening to this playlist, without error, Kenny could guess who’d submitted each song. It had cost me nothing but time, and yet he declared it his favourite present. I shouldn’t have been surprised – we live in an age of frictionless buying, where desires are satisfied with a click; that makes genuine gestures of affection more rare, more valuable.
Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve noticed a surge in creative gift-giving among my friends. As birthdays and anniversaries and graduations floated by, and we couldn’t mark these occasions in person, we turned to collages and mementoes. Several friends, on behalf of their spouses, asked us to record short videos describing favourite memories of times spent together.
This Christmas, my parents are getting a gift that can’t be found on Amazon. My brother snuck a bag of old VHS tapes out of their house and had them digitized. Old camping trips, school plays and birthday parties – nearly lost on the crumbling magnetic tape – are watchable again. Family history comes roaring back to life: a trip to Disneyland; my first birthday party (attended by my grandmother, who died just before the pandemic began); and a Christmas morning from long, long ago – my brothers and I wrapped in bathrobes, laughing, arguing, thrilling at the prospects under the tree.
Our memories of Christmas, though, don’t tell us what Christmas has to be. Even our most nostalgic ideas about the holiday are relatively recent inventions. For centuries, Christmas did mean a special feast, but not an orgy of wasteful consumption. By the 19th century, however, the growth of cities and the rise of a new middle class created the possibility of a different, gift-saddled holiday. Urban environments were seen as unsafe for children and middle-class parents (fearing the clamour of the streets) needed at-home rituals instead of public revelry.
The invention of photoengraving allowed corporations to market their goods with seductive imagery. A slightly toxic dream world of advertising arose, and Christmas was its holy day. Washington Irving built on simple Dutch traditions in his 1820 collection The Sketch Book, rebooting Christmas in a rhapsody of carols, mistletoe, games, feasting and a “great interchange of presents.” Just a few years later, the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas (a.k.a. The Night Before Christmas) was published, largely cribbing from Irving’s writing; it codified in the North American mind a Christmas whose focus was a pile of gifts for the children. And Santa evolved from a strange elf who might leave you a rag doll to a fat man whose sack overflowed with every sweet thing. At exactly this moment, the American toy industry began to emerge.
Industrialization brought on faster production speeds and fabulous surpluses of clothing, toys and housewares. To keep up the consumer’s end of the capitalist bargain, though, “want” had to replace “need” as the driver of shopping habits. We would no longer buy things for pragmatic purposes, but rather to express ourselves, to feel happy and to convince others that we cared. So, at Christmastime, we married the idea of love with store-bought merchandise. Were you a good child this year? Then Santa will bring you a Nintendo. Were you naughty? Then perhaps not. (Such “naughty or nice” economics betray a culture-wide hunch that the poor somehow deserve their predicament.) Holiday consumption became a marker of good citizenship, a sign of some moral good. This was made all too clear in an 1856 issue of Harper’s Magazine, which noted: “Love is the moral of Christmas ... What are gifts but the proof and signs of love?”
So: If the idea of Christmas as a glut of consumer spending is merely an invention, could it then be un-invented? Could Santa be transformed again, his sack emptied and recycled?
Last Christmas, Canadians were kept apart by the pandemic, trips home were largely cancelled, and we did grow fond of homemade tokens – and yet it all made only a tiny, barely noticeable dent in our spending. We spent 3 per cent less on gifts last year. All that interest in the homemade, all the new crafts and the baking, didn’t keep us from whipping out our credit cards, too.
And this year? Another chance to reimagine Christmas came our way – in the form of supply-chain troubles. Off the coast of California, a record number of container ships sat waiting for an opening at ports disrupted by labour shortages and pandemic-fouled logistics. Walmart and Home Depot chartered their own ships, hoping to circumvent the lineups. Meanwhile, in my province, historic floods demolished the highway system, cutting B.C. off from the world. Santa’s pack was cinched, throttled, stymied. All those AWOL sugarplums. Warnings were blasted as winter approached: the dolls, the Tonka trucks, the Fisher-Price toys, would all be in short supply this Christmas. The CEO of Basic Fun (purveyors of Care Bears, etc.) warned that shelves would be pocked with empty holes. In England, pandemic issues combined with Brexit troubles to spur November runs on turkeys and puddings.
And yet all this did not really frighten the gods of consumption. Our 3-per-cent dalliance with frugality last year was merely a blip. Savings rates have declined again – and this Christmas we returned to prepandemic shopping levels. Mastercard predicted an increase of 7.4 per cent in holiday spending this year. Deloitte believes the increase is as high as 9 per cent. In the U.S., holiday spending is expected to total US$1.3-trillion. We assert normalcy through shopping. It soothes us. So, while we did have a chance to imagine new kinds of gift-giving, new demonstrations of our love, even the double punch of a global pandemic and climate crisis was not quite enough to dismantle our consumer spirit.
Can a more lasting change be coming? We now know, after all, what enormous costs such consumption entails. We’ve grown acquainted with the carbon footprint of all we consume in the name of holiday warmth. Baked into the greedy Christmases of yore was an ignorance of harsh facts – for example, that consumption by the world’s affluent would surpass population growth as the major driver of climate change.
Perhaps, next Christmas, as we go shopping in our pandemic-shaken cities, we can reflect on the fuller meaning of “consume.” For much of history, to “consume” did not signal shopping at all – it only meant using up, exhausting, bringing to ruin. In the 15th century, a “consumer” was one who squandered. In the 17th century, a “consumptive” was one whose body was eaten away by disease. It was only in the Roaring 1920s that those shifting syllables took the shape of “consumerism” and came to signal a productive buying and getting. The new “consumer” was an always-right customer – an honest driver of the holiday economy, happily unaware that each purchase was also, in its way, an act of consumptive destruction in the 17th-century sense. Perhaps by next Christmas – or the Christmas after that – we’ll find a way to reintegrate the older meaning of “consume” into our idea of shopping. We may remember it isn’t so benign (or so loving) a behaviour.
When I watch that old video of Christmas morning long ago, I have to admit that the scene, crowded with gifts – my little brother rummaging under the tree and handing out parcels, a tag on each one – is heartwarming, lovable, hard to criticize. But times change and Christmas must change, too. We now have to search for some finer – and more durable – way to show our love.
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