Boycotting Christmas This Year

On Starving the Beast...

I really wanted an Etch-a-Sketch.

I wanted Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots and Hungry Hungry Hippos. A wanted a Stretch Amstrong and one of those Barbie heads. You know the one. It was just a bust of Barbie but you could do her hair. I didn’t tell anyone about that desire, though.

You name the toy, I wanted it when I was a kid. It’s not my fault. The 80’s was, to my memory, when all this began. And by this, I mean all this wanting. In my lifetime, the 80’s were when we, as a culture, really began equating people’s actual worth with their net worth or at least when I became acutely aware of it.

It got worse the older I got. My teenage years were mired by the confusion of conflation of want with need. I didn’t just want the jeans with someone else’s name on the back pocket, I needed them.

We were poor and America makes you feel like your poverty is all your fault. We teased each other for not having the latest and most expensive. For not wearing Nikes and Jordache Jeans. We learned early how important appearing wealthy was. The kids heckled one other for having “poor” parents when the truth was that my mother and father, like most Americans, did exactly what they were supposed to do. They worked. Every day. And we still had next to nothing. And I hated them for it. And at no time did this hatred present itself more strongly than at Christmas.

I can feel it now the way a buzzard can smell carrion from miles away. The dreaded season is coming. The commercials are on their way. The ads will feature beautiful people wearing violently colorful sweaters pouring fine liquors into glistening glassware. The stores will explode with silver and red in a gaudy celebration of unchecked, poinsettia-riddled capitalism.

I hate Christmas. Always have. But I especially hate it this year. It took me a long time to realize that all that stuff I wanted so badly was just…stuff.

We don’t speak up much, us holiday haters. We tend to keep our feelings to ourselves. We endure the commercial breaks that remind us that “Every kiss begins with Kay” and watch as still more beautiful people are surprised by enormous red bows on top of expensive cars. We watch the advertisements for Hallmark movies in which some successful yet unhappy woman moves to a small town and discovers the “true meaning of Christmas” by meeting some working-class dude for whom she will upend her entire life just because he gives her a snow globe.

But, this year, that noise feels more grotesque than ever as we all have a front row seat to how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. We watch how their tax breaks injure and destroy us. How farms, hospitals, and libraries close due to their unquenchable rapacity. I’ve had enough and so have you. I’m boycotting Christmas this year.

I won’t spend a dime on secret Santa or anything else. I won’t decorate. Because I’m tired of continually feeding a monster whose ultimate goal is to devour me whole. And I know that they, the millionaire and billionaire class look to Christmas above all other things to line their pockets by keeping us believing that want is actually need.

I come from a Christian family, and I recognize the significance of the holiday. I’m fully aware of what Christmas is supposed to be as opposed to what it’s become. I know the Jesus backstory; As a matter of fact, as a child, in a church play, I turned in quite a nuanced performance as a camel. But I hated Christmas even then because my family didn’t have money. We got practical presents in the good years: A scarf, new mittens, socks and, of course, the dreaded underpants. Our holiday tree glowing bright in the middle of the living room was always a beacon to disappointment.

But it wasn’t because my parents were “lazy”. It was because they were continually fighting a system that was and still is rigged for them to fail. And the irony of that situation is that they really would have loved to have given more money to that same system in order to make their children happy. But if happiness came from money, Elon Musk would be the most gleeful person on the planet.

He isn’t.

The steel mill where my father worked had closed under Ronald Reagan. But, that news did nothing to stop the commercials with shiny, happy, children opening reams of colorful paper to reveal the things that they’d always wanted from being beamed into our home. The ads seemed to suggest that the more stuff you got, the better person you were. I learned through those commercials that good people got presents and that my family was trash and I believed that for longer than I care to admit. It’s yet another way they turn the poor against each other.

Each year around this time, I find it more difficult to balance the awful things we see happening the rest of the year with the joy I’m supposed to drum up near the end of it. With age, it’s harder for me to reconcile the goodwill we’re supposed to feel at the holidays with the horrible way we treat each other the rest of the year. Especially this year. This year we will, once again, whip ourselves up into the delusion that we should support “goodness” and “kindness” when we are, at this point, one of t the least good and kind places on the planet.

I can’t do it this year. I can’t smile through it.

There have been other years when I have decided to skip Christmas completely, taken advantage of the fact that the whole country is shut down and silent, and spent the day watching horror movies alone and eating Chinese take-away. But, this year, that’s the actual plan. Let the wealthy untie bows. This year, there’s nothing for regular folks to celebrate.

For those who hate the holidays, I stand with you. I understand and know what you’re going through. If you are like me, you are strapping in again, steeling yourself for the onslaught the way others might for a hurricane.

But I’ll have none of it this year. It’s a bigger lie than ever.

I will see my family and friends and I will love on them with everything I have. That’s the more radical action in this climate than buying shit we don’t need. I am not suggesting that you should should not enjoy the holiday. But I’m going to do my part to starve the beast.

Boycott Christmas