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The history of our modern day christmas celebrations. essay
How commercialism stole Christmas
The history of our modern day christmas celebrations. essay
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Has christmas lost its meaning?, I personally feel that it has, it used to be such a religious day but now it has devolved into a day were all anyone cares about is their own personal gain weather it be a present or making profit off of the many americans who work nine-to-five jobs so that they can buy toys and other expensive luxuries that many of their children and/or friends are wanting for the holidays.
Christmas used to be about family and giving gifts to the less fortunate members of society, but now we take it for granted as a day of free things and goodies. One of the Major ways that christmas has changed is that the rich used to let the poor into their homes to eat and have a good time, and for those of us who were poor spent our
Christmastime is a time of joy, peace and love. It is also a time where people put aside their differences, accept one another for who they are and practice unconditional love. Right? Well, apparently not if you happen to lean towards the left politically. After all, there is nothing that liberals won't attack these days.
Few people can confidently say why the United States celebrates Christmas on December 25. And I imagine even fewer people know why we give gifts, or why we pucker up when we find ourselves under some mistletoe. The answers to these questions are under a thick layer of rich human and mythological history. For me, the majority of these discoveries were absolutely shocking—Christ was never in Christmas.
Ah Christmas, it is said to be the most wonderful time of the year. In the United States Christmas is a time of giving and receiving, spending time with your family, and in most Christian families, celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. Christmas is hands-down the most highly commercialized holiday celebrated by Americans. In fact, according to CBS news, the average American will spend $700 on gifts this holiday season, totaling for a whopping $465 billion spent nation-wide. From mall Santas as far as the eye can see, to hearing Christmas music in every retail store you enter. Christmas is a time of high spirits and high spending in the U.S.
Christmas has consumed itself. At its conception, it was a fine idea, and I imagine that at one point its execution worked very much as it was intended to. These days, however, its meaning has been perverted; its true purpose ignored and replaced with a purpose imagined by those who merely go through the motions, without actually knowing why they do so.
According to the current data, depending on the source being used, the United States is often regarded as a capitalist economy, but it is actually a “mixed economy” that is fueled by consumerism. In the day to day shuffle, society feels the consumerism and its manipulating control of consumers. Consumerism is a form of government control which leads society to form an almost uncontrollable buying habit, especially during the holiday season. Holidays, once spent with family to praise and give thanks, are now being taken over by the strong desire to run to an awesome sale to buy unnecessary stuff. Society is allowing the government to split families up during a holiday with the lure of unbelievable sales. Author Matt Walsh wrote an insightful online Huffington Post article titled, “If You Shop on Thanksgiving, You Are Part of the Problem.” In his article he also shows strong concern for society’s outrageous spending habits during the holiday season, and how the government fuels the shopping frenzy. Matt Walsh additionally goes so far as to state, “Why give thanks for what you have when there’s so much you don’t have? That’s the new meaning of Thanksgiving: count your blessings, and then buy some more blessings and count them again” (Walsh. Web). Society has strength in numbers to help stop the government from its money driven ways that play a role in families growing further apart. Society must be rehabilitated and forego this buying habit, return to traditional family values, and not allow the government to rape family unity through clever economic brainwashing.
The Christmas season is upon us once more. This year more than other years we hear more and more of people who shun humanity because they are too wrapped up in themselves and their own problems. Of people who would rather have that extra bottle of wine on their Christmas table than drop that money into the nearest Salvation Army kettle. The wine will be drunk but in the kettle it could have done some good for those who are needy and who won’t have anything to put on their tables. Each Christmas we are reminded of humanity and the goodness it can do to reunite people through the popular book by Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” and of course the many different variations represented in movies and a musical.
The well known holiday of Christmas today is far from what it was in it’s former being. Many aspects led to the change in Christmas, however Charles Dickens, a Victorian era author was arguably the most influential in the change. There was a time when christmas was not much more important than your average holiday. Without the work of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Regency Christmas would not have changed to be the way it is today. As we examine the Regency Christmas, the Christmas events in A Christmas Carol, new Christmas ideas, and today’s new christmas we will form the true Christmas.
Christmas is a special time of year that deserves to be remembered for its true meaning. Every year, Christmas becomes more and more commercialized and society forgets the origin of Christmas. It was not started with cookies, toys, and a fat man that delivers them, but instead it started with a humble inn where our Savior was born. The definition of Christmas is “a holiday on December 25 celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ.” Nowhere in that definition does it say anything about the outrageous pressure society has set on consumers to buy, buy, buy during the Christmas season. Christmas is about presence not presents.
The “Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry is a short story that has an interesting theme.
Today it seems as though Christmas has fallen victim to materialism and commercialization. Rather than it being a time of loving and giving, it has become a stressful season of greed. Amidst all the hustle and bustle, it is important for us to recognize the true reason of the season, and celebrate in a fashion that exemplifies that reason.
Holidays have always been known to affect our consumer culture for many years, but how it all began eludes many people and very few studies have been completed on it. Even though some say that the subject is too broad to precisely identify how holidays, especially Christmas, directly affect our market, I have found that people’s values, expectations and rituals related to holidays can cause an excessive amount of spending among our society. Most people are unaware that over the centuries holidays have become such a profitable time of year for industries that they now starting to promote gift ideas on an average of a month and a half ahead of actual holiday dates to meet consumer demands.
People have celebrated a mid-winter festival since pre-historic times. They marked the beginning of longer hours of daylight with fires and ritual offerings. The Roman festival of Saturnalia -- a time for feasting and gambling -- lasted for weeks in December. Germanic tribes of Northern Europe also celebrated mid-winter with feasting, drinking and religious rituals.
Christmas to me is a celebration, which includes spending time with my family, decorating the entire house, inside and out, and shopping, for the people I love. Doing this with the people I love is what means the most to me. Spending Christmas with my family is very important to me. We usually gather and celebrate at my parent’s house, in East Tennessee. My husband, our three children, and myself travel from California. My two sisters, their husbands, and children come from a nearby town, for our celebration.
On the other hand, more than half of the rest of the world will not be having the kind of holiday with presents, fireplaces, and television specials that most Americans are used to. In fact, the money U.S. parents spend on Christmas presents alone this year will probably be more than the annual income of over half the worlds population. It is heartbreaking.
When you look through history you can see evidence of these structures, some have never left and others have slowly morphed into other structures before becoming unrecognizable. Christmas is a structure that was established millennia’s ago that still rocks our culture every year in many different ways, from the religious customs and celebrations, to the economic impact of shopping for gifts, to the government holidays that surround this event. Our social structures are the skeletons for our lives, they are the voices from the worlds long forgotten that influence us, without them our world would not be what we know it to