"Commercialism Only Adds to Joy of the Holidays" by Onkar Ghate

[John Day]

Holiday themed articles certainly aren't new for ARI writers, but Onkar Ghate wrote a very fine piece for US News and World Report that avoided some of the banality and redundancy of past pieces and gives a little bit more of a personal touch. Check it out:

http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/2009/12/18/commercialism-only-adds-to-joy-of-the-holidays.html

Commercialism Only Adds to Joy of the Holidays

It's the season for earthly pleasures, and embracing the spectacle is no sin

By Onkar Ghate

Posted December 18, 2009

Onkar Ghate is a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif.

I'm an atheist, and I love Christmas. If you think that's a contradiction, think again.

Do you remember as a child composing wish lists of things you genuinely valued, thought you deserved, and knew would bring you pleasure? Do you remember eagerly awaiting the arrival of Christmas morning and the new bike, book, or chemistry set you were hoping for? That childhood feeling captures the spirit of Christmas and explains why so many of us look forward to the season each year.

You may no longer anticipate Christmas morning with that same childhood excitement. After all, even if you still make a wish list, couldn't you just go out and buy the items yourself? Yet the pleasure of exchanging gifts as a token of friendship and love remains. Particularly when you receive (or purchase) a gift that could come only from someone who knows you well—say, a shirt that broadens your style or a new wine that becomes one of your favorites—it serves as a material reminder of a spiritual bond.

More widely, through cards, telephone calls, parties, long-distance travel, and vacation, Christmas serves as a time to reconnect with cherished family and friends, to share important events of the past year, and to look forward to the next. It's a time to enjoy delectable chocolates, spiced eggnog, four-course meals, festive music, and party games.

Christmas is a spiritual holi­day whose leitmotif is personal, selfish plea­sure and joy. The season's commercialism, far from detracting from this celebration, as we're often told, is integral to it.

"The best aspect of Christmas," Ayn Rand once observed, is "that Christmas has been commercialized." The gift buying "stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by departments stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only 'commercial greed' could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle."

Before Christians co-opted the holiday in the fourth century (there is no reason to believe Jesus was born in December), it was a pagan celebration of the winter solstice, of the days beginning to grow longer. The Northern European tradition of bringing evergreens indoors, for instance, was a reminder that life and production were soon to return to the now frozen earth.

This focus on earthly joy is the actual source of the emotion most commonly identified with Christmas: goodwill. When you genuinely feel good about your own life and when you're allowed to acknowledge and celebrate that joy, you come to wish the same happiness for others. It is those who despise their own lives who lash out at and make life miserable for the rest of us.

The commercialism of Christmas reinforces our goodwill. When you scour the malls in search of the perfect gift for a loved one and witness the cornucopia of goods and lights and decorations, you can't help but feel that your fellow human beings are not enemies to be feared or fools to be avoided but fellow travelers and potential allies in the quest for joy. It's no accident that America, the world's most productive country, is also its most benevolent.

Christmas's relation to goodwill leads many to believe the holiday is inseparable from Christianity, allegedly the religion of goodwill. But the connection is tenuous. A doctrine that tells you that you're a sinner—that you must seek redemption but cannot earn it yourself and that Jesus, sinless, has endured an excruciating death to redeem you, who doesn't deserve his sacrifice but who should accept it anyway—can hardly be characterized as expressing a benevolent view of man.

Christianity from the outset has been suspicious of human, earthly pleasure and joy. At best, these are seen as unbecoming a sinner, who should be busy repenting and fretting over his fate in an imagined next life. There once existed a war against Christmas—when religionists held sway in America. The Puritans canceled Christmas; in Boston from 1659 to 1681, the fine for exhibiting Christmas merriment was 5 shillings.

Christmas as we know it, with its twinkling lights, flying reindeer, and dancing snowmen, is largely a creation of 19th-century America. One of the most un-Christian periods in Western history, it was a time of worldly invention, industrialization, and profit. Only such an era would think of a holiday dominated by commercialism and joy and sense the connection between the two.

Christmas in America is not a Christian holiday. And besides, in a country that separates church from state, no national holiday can be regarded as the purview of a religion.

But any celebration can be corrupted. It's not uncommon today to hear people say Christmas is their most stressful period. Pressed for time (and this year probably for money, too), they feel there are just too many lights to put up, meals to cook, and gifts to buy. Seeking something to blame, they blame the commercialism of the season. But there is no commandment, "Thou shall buy a present for every­one you know." This is the religious mentality of duty rearing its ugly head again. Do and buy only that which you can truly afford and enjoy; there are myriad ways to celebrate with loved ones without spending a cent.

But whatever you do end up doing, don't let the state of the economy rob you of the gaiety of the season. Perhaps now more than ever, we all need to remind ourselves that reaching joy on this Earth is the meaning of life.

Merry Christmas!

[Max Eichelberger]

That's the great thing about Christmas. To Objectivists it typifies commercial hedonism. To Communists it typifies communal wealth giving. To Conservative it typifies morality. To Liberals it typifies frivolity and community enhancing ACLU lawsuits. Christmas, like America, is everything to everyone.

And I can't think of a better compliment, for any holiday, than calling it American.

[BaalChatzaf]

That's the great thing about Christmas. To Objectivists it typifies commercial hedonism. To Communists it typifies communal wealth giving. To Conservative it typifies morality. To Liberals it typifies frivolity and community enhancing ACLU lawsuits. Christmas, like America, is everything to everyone.

And I can't think of a better compliment, for any holiday, than calling it American.

To me, it typifies fetish behavior, wallowing in wampum and a pain in the arse.

Bah! Humbug!

Ba'al Chatzaf

[anonrobt]

That's the great thing about Christmas. To Objectivists it typifies commercial hedonism. To Communists it typifies communal wealth giving. To Conservative it typifies morality. To Liberals it typifies frivolity and community enhancing ACLU lawsuits. Christmas, like America, is everything to everyone.

And I can't think of a better compliment, for any holiday, than calling it American.

To me, it typifies fetish behavior, wallowing in wampum and a pain in the arse.

Bah! Humbug!

You wear black these days too, huh...

Ba'al Chatzaf

[anonrobt]

That's the great thing about Christmas. To Objectivists it typifies commercial hedonism. To Communists it typifies communal wealth giving. To Conservative it typifies morality. To Liberals it typifies frivolity and community enhancing ACLU lawsuits. Christmas, like America, is everything to everyone.

And I can't think of a better compliment, for any holiday, than calling it American.

To me, it typifies fetish behavior, wallowing in wampum and a pain in the arse.

Bah! Humbug!

Ba'al Chatzaf

you wear black these days too, huh

[Alfonso Jones]

I enjoyed this essay, also.

Bill P

[9thdoctor]

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[Max Eichelberger]

That's the great thing about Christmas. To Objectivists it typifies commercial hedonism. To Communists it typifies communal wealth giving. To Conservative it typifies morality. To Liberals it typifies frivolity and community enhancing ACLU lawsuits. Christmas, like America, is everything to everyone.

And I can't think of a better compliment, for any holiday, than calling it American.

To me, it typifies fetish behavior, wallowing in wampum and a pain in the arse.

Bah! Humbug!

Ba'al Chatzaf

Like I said, it's everything to everyone. ;)

[Greybird]

It's worth noting that commercial advertisers are swinging back, slowly, to talking about "Christmas" rather than the generic "Holidays."

I'm glad that this is happening. Acknowledging the origins of the occasion — at least 1500 years of its being a Christian festival — gives it some historical roots and blossoms into providing some seasonal flavor. Being bland, so as to not offend any potential customers, ends up being pointless.

I never was against the commercializing, as such — just the implication, as Ghate said, that any of the gift-giving and related purchasing was culturally or societally obligatory. Government officials who depend on cooking the statistical economic books have an interest in pumping up the pseudo-obligation, to make their own failed policies look better.

* * *

I'm taking Bob Kolker off "ignore." It's become pointless, as everybody's quoting him anyway. *sigh*

Edited December 23, 2009 by Greybird

[Brant Gaede]

That's the great thing about Christmas. To Objectivists it typifies commercial hedonism. To Communists it typifies communal wealth giving. To Conservative it typifies morality. To Liberals it typifies frivolity and community enhancing ACLU lawsuits. Christmas, like America, is everything to everyone.

And I can't think of a better compliment, for any holiday, than calling it American.

To me, it typifies fetish behavior, wallowing in wampum and a pain in the arse.

Bah! Humbug!

Ba'al Chatzaf

Two out of three ain't bad.

--Brant

[Steve Gagne]

I was in Macy's today... I saw a bunch of women walking around in burkas...doing Christmas shopping.....

[Selene]

I was in Macy's today... I saw a bunch of women walking around in burkas...doing Christmas shopping.....

Allāhu Akbar!

[BaalChatzaf]

I was in Macy's today... I saw a bunch of women walking around in burkas...doing Christmas shopping.....

Why not? Macy's used to be owned by a Jewish family (or was it Gimbel's). Go figure.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

I was in Macy's today... I saw a bunch of women walking around in burkas...doing Christmas shopping.....

Why not? Macy's used to be owned by a Jewish family (or was it Gimbel's). Go figure.

Ba'al Chatzaf

I used to work at Gimbels, '70-'71. There were Jews all over the place! I remember one worked right next to me. I talked to her a lot. There was a nice stamp department on the ground floor where I purchased a lot of the stamps AR said she especially liked in her Minkus catalog article, which I think was published right across the street. I was in furniture customer service on the top floor. One day I went out to pick up one of the first answering machines to handle the call overflow. It cost 220 in 39 years'-ago dollars. On another day I return this guy's call. A lady picks up the phone. After a few words back and forth she said, "Brant, is that you?" It was my step-Mother who was an immigration judge who worked in the Federal Bldg right north of the World Trade Center site. She was walking by this guy's office and heard the phone ringing and went in and picked it up.

--Brant