A Capitalist Christmas

X-Mas 2021 was my first Christmas in America––albeit, I was in California so it was not a 🎶 White Christmas 🎶 , that is if there are any more of those left (#twelvedaysofwarning). And it was, to say the least, a deeply conflicting experience.

I’m not a Christian, and I’ve never celebrated Christmas quite like I thought it would be celebrated in this country, but I’m a Christmas baby––Jesus 2.0 if you may––so I can say whatever I want. Even I, whose birthday is on Christmas and will not turn down an offer to hype up my b’day, was surprised by how early the Christmas prep starts. All the way before the celebration of colonial genocide (i.e. Thanksgiving), the Starbucks red-green-white cups start coming out. Following Thanksgiving are the entrancing schemes of Black Friday and Cyber Monday––the best (read: cheapest) time to shop for Christmas gifts. Naïvely, I thought this was the largest email spam I was going to get, and boy, was I wrong.

(On a side note, this school sends so many emails. But so does SavagexFenty, and so does every single brand to whom I don’t even recollect giving my email address. I check my email before I check my partner’s texts every morning; that email fatigue is so real.)

December starts and the Christmas offer emails trickle in, reminding you that you have not yet shopped for that one roommate, your best friend across the Atlantic, or your baby sister. I spent an inordinate time looking through gift guides during finals season, which is interesting because I don’t gift my family (or friends) things for Christmas! (It’s not because I’m the Grinch realized, I just wasn’t going to be around any of them and it’s not a tradition I am used to honoring.) My favorite gift guide, if you’re looking for unachievable recommendations, is the Kardashian’s gifting guide. (Happy (window, or tab I guess) shopping!) I’m not going to go on and on about the ills of capitalism and how everything with tradition is being morphed into a way for corporations to make money––we already know that, we go to this school––but it becomes so obvious in the holiday season.

Fun fact: gift-giving was a tradition started by 19th century New York City aristocrats. The December holidays were a time for the poor could demand food and drink from the wealthy, and party it up in the streets. But when rich people started buying gifts, they made it a “cozier, limited-to-family” holiday. Christmas, in every Hallmark movie I’ve seen, is spent in little wooden cabins with a fireplace and a warm mug, laughing with family and friends while watching Vanessa Hudgens play the cousin of the queen who’s trying to steal the crown (Princess Switch, anyone?). When I say I wasn’t expecting Christmas to be this wrapped up (pun intended) in the obsession with gift-giving, I mean it. 

Don’t get me wrong: the lights and decorations are gorgeous, I love the trees (even did a little series on my Instagram documenting all the trees I saw), and the red-green-white color scheme looks great on me. So when Christmas actually rolled around, I was super excited to be out in the streets and see old white men dressed up as Santa. To my surprise, everything was shut.

My family and I got breakfast at one of the three restaurants that were open in downtown San Francisco, and then spent the day tramping around the Golden Gate Bridge. For dinner, we ended up driving to some family’s house an hour away because they, knowing that nothing would be open, wanted to have us over. This is where the contradiction comes in: Christmas is all about gifts, but there is (a) nowhere open to buy gifts on Christmas, and (b) nowhere to go on Christmas if you don’t want to spend the holiday alone or with family. It seems that the capitalistic and consumerist ethos of Christmas clashes very strongly with the idea that nobody wants to work on Christmas––which is fair, but makes for a unique experience. In Mumbai (where I’m from), everything is extra open on Christmas: restaurants run later hours, stores are full of people and the streets are jam-packed. 

All in all, it was an interesting experience––a culturally revealing one at it. I did end up shopping for Christmas––for myself, my partner, my sister, and my friends––but I definitely went a lil morally bankrupt putting in those discount codes at checkout. This brings me to my last point: the actual gift itself. Thankfully, I and the people in my life are great gift-givers, so I don’t anticipate this being a problem but while doing my research for this article, I came across a piece that talked about replacing the entire idea of Christmas gifting with gifting cash as a way to prevent the economic and consumerist wastage characteristic of the holiday. Here’s an excerpt: 

“The textbook understanding of the economics of Christmas giving is not encouraging. Here’s an example to explain the theory: As a general preference, I like books. As a Christmas gift, a friend who knows this about me buys me a book, but he misjudges my specific preferences and buys me a book that I do not like. This book costs my friend $27.99. This is a shame, because I value the book only at 12 cents. In this case, the gift exchange will have “wasted” $27.87 of value ($27.99 minus 12 cents) compared with the scenario in which my friend gives me $27.99 in cash so I can purchase whatever I most want. Cash, ergo, results in no “waste,” and so is superior to gifts.

Since this happens millions of times every Christmas, some economists conclude (with much too much self-satisfaction) that Christmas gift-giving creates massive economic waste. The scale of this waste is large — potentially billions of dollars annually.

If ‘the logic of capitalism’ compels us to give cash instead of gifts, then the redeeming features of Christmas-meets-consumerism will have been eliminated.”

In theory, this makes sense but what are its practical implications? (Wasn’t that so very UChicago of me? I loved it.) Cash is an impersonal gift, and it won’t hold up to my partner gifting me a hard copy of my favorite book with a little note on the front page, but is it more utilitarian? Possibly. 
When it comes down to it, all I know about Christmas is this: I love the trees, I like the gifts, and I hate how early things shut. Amid everything happening, I hope everybody had a happy Christmas and a merry new year!