December 23, 2011 8:34 pm
We wish you a merry Christmas. . . and a luxury new car
Of course, not everyone was introspective or serious enough for that. For them, Christmas meant sitting around a steaming goose with four generations of extended family, gossiping about the neighbours and getting tipsy on sherry.
One hears complaint about the materialism of Christmas much more rarely nowadays. This is probably not because we are better at discerning the holiday’s true meaning. More likely it is that materialism has prospered to such an extent that none dare call it materialism. For the past couple of years, Lexus has run television ads suggesting ways for people to give their loved ones cars for Christmas. There is something obscene about these spots, which promote something called the December to Remember Sales Event. (Why it’s not called the Grind-the-Faces-of-the-Poor Sales Event is anyone’s guess.) The giving of the gift usually involves some elaborate consumer goods equivalent of a striptease or treasure hunt to heighten the atmosphere of materialism. Someone gets the present of a smart phone, for instance, which has the picture of a new car programmed on to it. Maybe next year, the cars will come with GPS directions to a newly bought country estate. Just an idea.
The Lexus ads are certainly materialistic but they are, to some extent, exceptions. Christmas may be more commercial than it used to be but “commercial” is no longer a synonym for “material”. A lot of people give experiences instead of things. That is exactly what we ought to do with our money if we want to maximise happiness, according to a recent article in the Journal of Consumer Psychology by the social psychologists Elizabeth Dunn, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson. But in practice, the line between experiences and things is hard to draw. If you buy someone a video game, have you given him a thing or an experience? Is it less materialistic to give someone a pretty, hardcover copy of Pride and Prejudice than it is to give them a television? Is it less materialistic to give the Kindle edition of Pride and Prejudice than the hardcover?
One suspects that complaints about materialism proliferated in the Charlie Brown era because children proliferated in the Charlie Brown era. The real gripe was that having to buy expensive toys for kids distracted adults from servicing their own consumerism. The opening up of China, from which an astonishing 89 per cent of American toys come, has fixed matters a bit because toys nowadays are, by historical standards, inexpensive.
As US companies have shut down assembly lines, agitation against Christmas materialism has grown more political. There is a character named Reverend Billy, who shows up at Occupy protests and calls for people to stop giving Christmas gifts. There is a website called xmasresistance.org. It’s surprising there isn’t more organisation against Yuletide avarice – because efforts to stoke that avarice are well organised indeed. Retailers and etailers co-ordinate month-long selling strategies to separate consumers from their dollars, running from Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, to Super Saturday, the last one before Christmas.
In the old days, materialism was considered the opposite of spiritualism and thus a threat to the Christian aspects of Christmas. Now, it is more a threat to social and family life. According to a recent poll by the Family and Parenting Institute in Britain, 84 per cent of parents worry that Christmas makes children more materialistic. This year may be different in Britain, where a VAT rise, inflation and austerity have dented retailers’ expectations for a big Christmas shopping season. In the US, Kmart and other stores have, at customers’ request, re-established old-fashioned layaway plans, under which, every week, buyers pay a 10th or a 12th of the cost of some expensive appliance or article of clothing and then go in and pick it up with their last payment.
Such developments reveal another reason not to complain too much about materialism. It is a problem that tends, however painfully, to solve itself.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
What Christmas ought never to mean, though, was going into hock to buy great big piles of merchandise stamped out on American assembly lines, that television advertisers had misled people into thinking they needed in the first place. There seemed to be a consensus about this.
One hears complaint about the materialism of Christmas much more rarely nowadays. This is probably not because we are better at discerning the holiday’s true meaning. More likely it is that materialism has prospered to such an extent that none dare call it materialism. For the past couple of years, Lexus has run television ads suggesting ways for people to give their loved ones cars for Christmas. There is something obscene about these spots, which promote something called the December to Remember Sales Event. (Why it’s not called the Grind-the-Faces-of-the-Poor Sales Event is anyone’s guess.) The giving of the gift usually involves some elaborate consumer goods equivalent of a striptease or treasure hunt to heighten the atmosphere of materialism. Someone gets the present of a smart phone, for instance, which has the picture of a new car programmed on to it. Maybe next year, the cars will come with GPS directions to a newly bought country estate. Just an idea.
The Lexus ads are certainly materialistic but they are, to some extent, exceptions. Christmas may be more commercial than it used to be but “commercial” is no longer a synonym for “material”. A lot of people give experiences instead of things. That is exactly what we ought to do with our money if we want to maximise happiness, according to a recent article in the Journal of Consumer Psychology by the social psychologists Elizabeth Dunn, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson. But in practice, the line between experiences and things is hard to draw. If you buy someone a video game, have you given him a thing or an experience? Is it less materialistic to give someone a pretty, hardcover copy of Pride and Prejudice than it is to give them a television? Is it less materialistic to give the Kindle edition of Pride and Prejudice than the hardcover?
One suspects that complaints about materialism proliferated in the Charlie Brown era because children proliferated in the Charlie Brown era. The real gripe was that having to buy expensive toys for kids distracted adults from servicing their own consumerism. The opening up of China, from which an astonishing 89 per cent of American toys come, has fixed matters a bit because toys nowadays are, by historical standards, inexpensive.
As US companies have shut down assembly lines, agitation against Christmas materialism has grown more political. There is a character named Reverend Billy, who shows up at Occupy protests and calls for people to stop giving Christmas gifts. There is a website called xmasresistance.org. It’s surprising there isn’t more organisation against Yuletide avarice – because efforts to stoke that avarice are well organised indeed. Retailers and etailers co-ordinate month-long selling strategies to separate consumers from their dollars, running from Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, to Super Saturday, the last one before Christmas.
In the old days, materialism was considered the opposite of spiritualism and thus a threat to the Christian aspects of Christmas. Now, it is more a threat to social and family life. According to a recent poll by the Family and Parenting Institute in Britain, 84 per cent of parents worry that Christmas makes children more materialistic. This year may be different in Britain, where a VAT rise, inflation and austerity have dented retailers’ expectations for a big Christmas shopping season. In the US, Kmart and other stores have, at customers’ request, re-established old-fashioned layaway plans, under which, every week, buyers pay a 10th or a 12th of the cost of some expensive appliance or article of clothing and then go in and pick it up with their last payment.
Such developments reveal another reason not to complain too much about materialism. It is a problem that tends, however painfully, to solve itself.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
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