Shore Musings is a column about life on the Cape from the editor of the Herald’s Do the Shore magazine.
Christmas is expensive. I’m no big spender – certainly can’t afford to be on a comms salary – but my seasonal purchases skyrocket as stores hit the one-two punch of Halloween into Christmas. I, perhaps in arrogance, channel the spirit of the late Herald editor Joe Zelnick in my disdain for the commercialization of the sacred and holy. I was budgeting for the coming month and was shocked at what fell out of my leaky wallet. Here’s the breakdown:
Christmas junk from Target’s seasonal novelty section – $20
Christmas lights, hooks, decorations – $150
Big-box store Christmas tree – $80
New ornaments – $15
Christmas tree base – $22
Christmas presents (for family, girlfriend, stepbrother, guinea pigs, cats) – $500
Christmas-themed candy – $15 (that’s 15 boxes of Christmas Dots. This one was a deal.)
Grand Total: $802
Brands, stores and businesses pry into my wallet under the guise of sentiment and memory. It’s intentional. I was a communications major at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, and even though Gordon prides itself on its analytical Christian perspective, they towed the heavy load of commercialism in marketing class.
I am thankful for what I learned at Gordon, but the glitter and excess of the marketing world left me in a tizzy. Is there no alternative?
The first class I took on the subject was a tour-de-force on psychological manipulation. We learned that to truly sell a product, you must speak to your customer’s most primal wants. It isn’t enough to sell your audience on the merits of your product, you must insist that life might feel vacant without it.
That’s why the bottom-of-the-barrel tat at TJ Max calls itself “limited edition.” That’s why the Fortnite battle passes, with their glitzy skins and beautifully rendered hotties, only last three months and are gone forever. That’s why beauty products, if only through marketing jargon, promise eternality and health.
Over time, hundreds of products have weaseled into my life because I have poor impulse control; I’m a sucker for these tactics. My mom calls me a “marketer’s dream.” Christmas is perhaps the culmination of this: The American marketing machine has successfully synthesized sentiment with endless spending.
But save one cute Pokémon plush, my favorite holiday memories are at odds with spending money. I remember learning to carol as a kid, the view of my late father as he stood atop the Herald delivery truck during the Wildwood Christmas parade, and the day my little sister broke down during a Christmas Eve candlelight service.
“A Christmas Carol,” that famous novella by Charles Dickens, is a warning to readers against the status quo of money, things and stuff. The pro-worker novella popularized many of the Christmas tropes that are so common today: tinsel, a holiday turkey, caroling, a white Christmas … It’s notable that Scrooge is not evil by the laws of Victorian England; he followed the accepted business culture of his time but confused good business with morality.
The two are often at odds. Dickens spent much of his life speaking against practices that are good for profit but bad for mankind. As a child, he worked in a factory and rejected the terrible conditions they normalized in the name of progress. It is in his spirit, then, to reject the exploitation-ridden objects of our time: cheap plastic Hello Kitty Santas made by 12-hour workers in China, plastic tinsel that will live on the Earth for a thousand years, and the idea that happiness lives on an aisle.
Sufjan Stevens, a folk singer who has written more than 100 Christmas songs, hits the mark. His Christmas songs are all over the map but some of his best flirt with the Industrial Christmas Machine in a way that made me stand back and say: Woe is me! Woe to American Christmas! Woe to me when I spend a hundred dollars at Wal-Mart on plastic tinsel!
Stevens said in a recent interview that “Christmas is Frankenstein’s monster. You just start dropping all of the cultural artifacts, you get Charlie Brown, Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph and lights. Then there’s Santa Claus coming down the chimney. The whole thing is clear evidence of the depth of human pathology, what happens when we let our obsessions run wild.”
It’s free to attend a Christmas celebration here in town. It’s free to see the wonderful Angelus Chorus as they sing meaningful hymns. It’s free to watch the carolers at Cape May’s hospitality night. It’s not free, but it is helpful, to make food bank donations at places like the Methodist Church in Sea Isle or the Cape May Community Food Closet.
At the end of the day, the feeling and warmth of Christmas is free. Because Christmas is free.
This column originally ran in December 2022 in the print edition of the Herald but was not uploaded online. This year, I spent a whole lot less on Christmas! What the heck was I thinking with $800, that’s insanity … But the column still stands.
Contact Collin Hall at chall@cmcherald.com or 609-886-8600, ext. 156.
