The Rocket

Issue date: 11/30/07 Section: Opinion

It's been sneaking up on us since Halloween, lurking around the department store shelves, infiltrating my inbox and television with merry ads of consumerism and fat men in red suits: It's Christmas.

Somebody forgot to tell me that Christmas started two months in advance. As soon as Halloween threatened to end, there were Christmas ornaments and candy canes on the shelves.

Maybe it's just me, but I like to keep my holidays separate. I don't like to be told over and over again that "Christmas is coming." I know it's coming-it comes around every December. I'm not going to sleep through the entire month of November and suddenly be surprised that Christmas is next week.

It's bad enough that Christmas has become a year-round thing, but now I have to deal with Christmas commercials, and everybody knows that if I hate anything, it is happy children (and being taken seriously). Children already had their holiday-it was Halloween, the pagan holiday where they dress up and go out to trick-or-treat.

Christmas is a Christian holiday. It is said to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Christmas is a time when all of the children of Christian parents should be rounded up and dragged to church so they can sit uncomfortably for a few hours. It shouldn't involve commercials for lead-laden toys on every other channel.

If I were a Christian, I would be outraged at the commercialization of this once-holy day. Christmas has been steadily becoming more and more about mass consumerism and iPods, and less and less about Jesus and virgin births.

I guess Hanukkah would be just as consumerism-oriented if there just weren't so many rules and rituals to the holiday, and perhaps if it didn't last so long. That's one thing that I think really sets Hanukkah gift-giving apart from Christmas gift-giving. Most Jewish people get a gift every night, whereas at Christmas, it's a windfall of electronics. We Americans like it quick and dirty. That's why Christmas is our holiday of choice.

I don't know. I've never been big on Christmas, because I consider it a religious holiday, and I'd like it to stay that way. At least the private celebration of the birth of someone's lord and savior isn't all up in my face all of the time. I'm surprised Christians haven't taken their holiday back yet. If America's such a "Christian Nation," then why doesn't it act like it? This mainstream kind of Christmas is pervasive, irritating, and one of the reasons that many people in the world are irritated with Americans and their attitudes.

We spend and spend and spend. Gas is $3.15 a gallon, housing sales are tanking all over the country, Iran's still acting surly and Blackwater workers are on steroids in Iraq. The stock market can't figure out if it wants to go up or down and the world is supposedly coming to an end in 2012...but we keep spending.

We might not have any money to spend on iPhones and Zunes, but if there's a Christmas to celebrate, we are going to spend until it hurts. And it will.

Despite what Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity might tell you, the American economy isn't doing so hot. Then again, they also tell me that the atheists in this country are ruining Christmas for the rest of us by making store clerks say "happy holidays," rather than "Merry Christmas." Instead, I believe that the Christians who won't reclaim their godly holiday and instead let it wallow in the mediocrity of spending and consumerism are the ones ruining the holidays.

So, whether it's "happy holidays," "Happy Hanukkah" or whatever it is you want to say or celebrate, I hope everyone's holiday season is, at the very least, entertaining.

Lisbeth Wells-Pratt is a freshman creative writing major and a regular contributor to The Rocket.

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