The Ghost of Christmas Passed

DIY Gingerbread House

This is available for purchase as early as August.

Much has been made (as much often is made) about the Christmas Creep, the notion that somehow big retailers rolling out their Christmas stuff after (or before) Halloween somehow denigrates the holiday, your holiday, other people’s holiday, or something. The Christmas Creep complaint always has baffled me in that it sets the false premise (that Christmas was at some point in living memory a less commercial holiday) and reaches an equally false conclusion (that extra-commercializing Christmas someone reduces either a person’s big box shopping experience or their ability to romanticize the holiday as they see fit).

The Christmas Creep complaint goes to something deeper. I don’t for a second believe the complaints come from the fact of the holiday’s expansion so much as from our relation to the holiday. But, here, let’s have Scrooge explain the existential angst that drives the Christmas Creep complaint:

What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in them through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?

That quote is 170 years old, and the sentiment is older than Christmas. Winter is coming and the only way to find out whether or not you have your survival ducks in a row is to see if you make it until March.

Happy X-mas.

Upping your game

It would be dishonest to pretend that many if not most of us can reasonably do without the box stores. Even if we’re wealthy enough to afford boutique toilet paper, at the end of the day convenience and cost savings will always win in our day to day lives. Frankly, I’m not so sure it shouldn’t. Dry goods, paper goods and much of the staple food is impossible or impractical to buy outside of box stores. And truly, if you’re not purchasing only artisan toilet paper, you’re doomed to make the mega corps richer. Just like the Christmas Creep, admit your fighting the wrong battle here.

The right battle to fight, the thing worth having is use of the time and the money you have left to your discretion. I have taken the liberty sloganing it for you: Less Stuff, Better Stuff (it started out as Less Beer, Better Beer and grew from there). Take the time to get the better stuff you might prefer, or those to

Mindie Burgoyne has argued convincingly elsewhere about getting local merchants to get online