If you’ve ever said “Christmas has gotten too commercial!” well, you’re not the
first.
Complaints about excessive spending during the holidays go back over a hundred years,
when Victorians lamented having to buy cards and gifts for all their acquaintances and
recoiled from the garishness of London’s department stores displays.
Today, we’re so used to the marriage of Christmas and shopping that we rarely stop
to wonder how it got this way.
Is there something inherent about the holiday that makes it so expensive?
And is it really good for us… or the economy?
Many people think the tradition of gift-giving comes from the story of the Magi in the New
Testament, who visited baby Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
But swapping handmade gifts was already a part of pagan winter festivals, like the Romans’
Saturnalia, a raucous week-long party which took place in late December.
As Christianity spread across Europe, keeping the schedules and traditions of established
holidays made it more attractive to prospective converts, so sometime around 300 AD, the Church
officially moved Jesus’s birthday to December 25th.
For over a thousand years, Christmas ambled along as a minor observance, nowhere near
as important as the major Christian holiday, Easter.
In the 1600s, Puritans like Oliver Cromwell and the Pilgrims who settled America outright
banned the celebration of Christmas, because they found it too decadent and… pagan-y.
It really wasn’t until the early 1800s that Christmas as we know it today started to take
shape, thanks largely to authors like Charles Dickens, Washington Irving and Clement Clarke
Moore, who assembled some of their favorite holiday customs into a standardized package.
They rebranded it as a family-centric celebration, with a strong emphasis on generosity.
That meant sharing meals, donating to charity, and, of course, gift-giving.
Gifts were still mostly handmade, but a lot of money was spent on food.
Whether you were a poulterer, a baker, a brewer or a fruiterer (it’s a word), December was
a busy--and profitable--month.
As the Industrial Revolution kicked into high gear, urban populations increased and manufactured
goods became widely available to a burgeoning middle class.
Gifts shifted from something you made to something you bought.
By the end of the 1800s, Christmas had been commandeered by an institution that would
hold it hostage for a hundred years: the department store.
These all-in-one mega-retailers would go all out, with elaborate decorations and window
displays that attracted huge crowds.
Print catalogs offered an easy way to make wish lists.
And in 1890, an American businessman named James Edgar had the crazy idea of dressing
up as Santa Claus at his Massachusetts department store and, boy, did that catch on!
Everyone knows that Christmastime seems to start earlier every year, but you might be
surprised to learn that the first people to advocate early shopping were not retailers,
but labor activists.
The season had become so busy that the government allowed businesses to ignore the already weak
labor laws during the month of December, and employees were routinely overworked--many
of them children.
In her essay, “The Travesty of Christmas,” NAACP co-founder Florence Kelley advocated
early shopping as a way to alleviate the pressure on workers, and recounts the story of a boy
who died of exposure after working an 18-hour shift delivering Christmas gifts in New York’s
freezing winter.
Department stores were happy to make the holiday season as long as possible, but they had a
sort of unwritten rule amongst them that they wouldn’t start promoting Christmas until
after Thanksgiving.
So FDR pushed back the official date of Thanksgiving from the last Thursday in November to the
fourth Thursday in November in order to squeeze as many days as possible into the shopping
season.
Starting in the early 50s, the day after Thanksgiving became known as Black Friday, as a reference
to the general chaos that resulted from workers calling in sick to get a four day weekend.
By the 1960s, police departments had adopted the usage to describe the overwhelming crowds
and traffic caused by the onset of holiday shopping.
Retailers embraced the name with Black Friday sales and promotions, though they did attempt
to rebrand the origins of the term into something more positive.
Despite what you’ve heard, Black Friday is not a reference to the day businesses get
“back in the black.”
Stores have been steadily pushing back the opening time on Black Friday in the last few
decades, from dawn to midnight, even to Thanksgiving evening, prompting some strikes by workers
robbed of their holiday dinner with the family.
Today, Black Friday is something of a controversy, with viral videos of mobs pushing and fighting
each other for the best bargains.
It’s become a symbol of the greed and competitiveness that Christmas is NOT supposed to be about,
tragically epitomized by the death of a Long Island WalMart employee, who was trampled
by 200 frenzied shoppers who broke through the glass doors before the store opened.
Both Oliver Cromwell and Florence Kelley would be very disappointed if they were alive today.
And they’d be very confused by the newest form of holiday consumerism: online Christmas
shopping.
While ecommerce only represents around 17% of holiday shopping, that number has been
steadily growing over the past decade, particularly focused on a day that the National Retail
Federation dubbed “Cyber Monday.”
That’s right, three days after Black Friday, after a tiring weekend of mall-walking, it
seems that many people decide to finish up their holiday shopping on the web.
And more than half of those orders are placed from work computers… only on lunch breaks,
right guys?
Even if you find all this commercialism distasteful, you still have to admit that this annual spending
spree is good for the economy, right?
Maybe not.
While many retailers indeed depend on Christmas to remain profitable, there are concerns that
have nothing to do with spirituality or tradition.
Economics professor Joel Waldfogel famously called Christmas shopping a “deadweight
loss,” which basically means that it’s a lot of spending without an equivalent positive
gain.
For instance, if I give Philip a 10 dollar bill, I’ve lost 10 bucks, but he’s gained
10 bucks, so the overall economy has broken even.
But if I give Julia a 10 dollar gift that she doesn’t want, and she just sticks it
on a shelf in the garage or even throws it away, I’m out 10 bucks without any equivalent
gain elsewhere.
Think of all the millions of Christmas gifts people have given or received that didn’t
end up being used or enjoyed.
They’ve all contributed to a deadweight loss on the economy, estimated by Waldfogel
to be around $4 to $13 billion dollars a year.
But, you might say, those purchases help the manufacturer and the retailer!
Doesn’t that make up for the loss?
True, but in a healthy economy, businesses make money by selling products that consumers
actually want.
Besides, who are you trying to give a gift to?
Your nephew, or Walmart?
Fortunately, deadweight loss is pretty minimal when it comes to close friends and relatives,
because we know them well enough to make good guesses about what they’d want.
But if you’re buying for acquaintances, co-workers or extended family, sticking to
gift cards might make them--and the economy--happier.
There have been some movements to take the commerce out of Christmas, like Buy Nothing
Day (not coincidentally held on Black Friday), and it is true that many people report high
levels of stress or anxiety about holiday shopping.
But at the same time, there seems to be a fundamental connection between Christmas and
spending money that will probably never go away.
Just look at the book that people like to say “invented” Christmas as we know it:
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
Besides being filled with references to shops and markets overflowing with goods for purchase,
the main character’s principal flaw is that he’s a penny-pincher.
Once Scrooge has his big transformation and finally understands the true meaning of Christmas,
the first thing he does is throw open the window, flag down a passing child, and tell
him to go buy something!
Go and buy it then!
Go and buy it!
Yes! Go and buy it!
Go and buy it!
If Dickens is right about Christmas being a celebration of family and generosity, well,
you can’t throw a party or give to charity without parting with some shillings.
That doesn’t mean you should Santa yourself into the poorhouse, but humans have an obvious
tradition of connecting through gift-giving, so it’s okay to that for one month of the
year, we’re willing to make an investment whose return can’t be recorded in a ledger.
And that’s our two cents!
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What's the most meaningful gift you've ever received? And how much do you think it cost?
Let us know in the comments.