Christmastide

Someone reminded me the other day that it is still Christmastide. My dad explained Christmastide to me when I asked him why we had a vacation from school in the middle of winter. Our school still called it Christmas Vacation then. He mentioned the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and told me that Christmastide lasts until January 5^th. I didn’t participate in Christmastide activities at church growing up, but I usually enjoyed it.

My sister and I usually spent our Christmas vacations staying with grandparents, cousins, or our mom. When I got old enough to take the bus on my own my cousin and I would knock around downtown St. Paul. I later explored the Twin Cities by bus on my own during Christmastide. I thought this was great fun. I saw places I didn’t get to see very often and had conversations with people I normally would not have: bus drivers, fellow passengers, waitresses, store clerks, panhandlers and librarians.

I think I spent most of the time between Christmas and New Year’s Day exploring the radio dial one year. I am grateful that I got to attend many different kinds of New Year’s Eve parties. My aunt and uncle usually had a big dinner on New Year’s Day. After I grew up and moved out of town I spent part of Christmastide traveling between Columbus and Minneapolis. I flew out to Phoenix and back for Christmas of 2001 – just a few months after 9/11.

These days I don’t get to knock around during Christmastide the way I used to. I have a job and a mortgage and a kid. This makes me grateful for social media and the Internet in general. I hope that I can give my son the same sense of wonder and adventure that the Christmastide helped me develop as I was growing up.

Merry Christmas, Suckers

We frequently hear or read that 1% of the population of the United States holds 95% of the wealth of the United States. I often hear the question, “How much do you need?” in discussions about the 1%. We may like to think of the 1% as greedy bloodsuckers, but we don’t make it very difficult for them to take our money. Christmas provides a good example.

The term “Black Friday” comes from accounting jargon. Before they had electronic spreadsheets, accountants recorded debts and losses in red ink and recorded gains and profits in black ink on paper ledgers. Historically, many retailers operated at a loss until the day after Thanksgiving, when we all started our Christmas shopping. So, the day after Thanksgiving became known as “Black Friday” because that is when the retailers finally started showing a profit – or started operating “in the black” - for the year. Imagine that. A store stays open all year long just so that we can spend money during the last month of the year.

We can count the family that owns Walmart among the 1%. Walmart has helped us to start a new Holiday tradition: recording our neighbors brawling with each other over merchandise on Thanksgiving Day and posting those videos on social media. We do not brawl with each other over bread because of hunger, we brawl with each other over a bunch of junk that we don’t need. We camp out in front of BestBuy in order to get a place in line so that we can buy electronic devices that we can’t figure out how to use. We trample each other to get shoes that bear the name of a retired professional basketball player. We pay huge premiums for clothing with huge logos of professional sports franchises so we can have the privilege of becoming mobile signs for private businesses.

We give our money to the 1% all year long at the gas pump. We drive around in outrageously large vehicles and drive them much faster than necessary. We think public transportation is for bums and bicyclists just slow us down. We urge each other to “support our troops,” never thinking that if we didn't demand so much gasoline the oil companies wouldn't have the power to put our boys and girls in harm’s way.

I could go on about other rackets such as makeup, TV and food. We pay more for branding and attractive packaging than we do for the actual food. We helped banks become too big to fail by accepting loans from them for more house than we need.

I have heard complaints about the commercialization of Christmas my whole life. My question to you this Christmas, Mr. and Mrs. 99%: How much do you need?