Well… the question is, as supposed much more simple than the answer. If we ask like that, the first thing we have to move out of the way is another question: What is Christmas anyway? As a base for this, I want to define christmas as a couple of days in every year around the 24-26 of December, we celebrate the love and kindness left in this world. For some days, everything should be ok and we should remember, the situation we are in has still some good things to give.
Then… is Christmas really gone? I don’t know.. perhaps I have only chosen this title, because I wanted to make this blog sound more interesting ;). But what I can be sure of is, that chistmas is not what it once was for me. Lets start at the gifts.
Yesterday, on the 8.12.2005, there was a late talk in #debian-liniux on irc.euirc.net (with MrJH, axg and starseeker (guessed right, thats me)) about gifts and what motivates us to buy them or what motivates us to give someone something as a gift. This talk occured because axg told us that his birthday was tomorrow (10.12.2005) and that he already got his “birthday money”. This is not his fault, but suddenly I felt really sad.
I tried to define why that was so and there were quite some reasons we found. Giving money as a gift for birthday or on christmas is something really essential to this problem… so lets take a look why people do that. We together formed about 4 theories, listed here from less to more sad (and therefore less to more important for our question from the start). So, why does someone give money as a gift for a person he/she likes?
Someone has found the right gift for a person but doesn’t know where to get it from. This can happen if its a very uncommon gift or if the person is not familiar with the internet.
Someone is afraid of being embarressed if the prerson he/she gives it to doesn’t like the gift. This is some reason, some people don’t make gifts anyway. This already is some kind of sad.
Someone doesn’t know the person, the gift is for that well to think of a good one, so he/she gives money. This is really sad, because it reflects a general problem of our society very well. We don’t look after each other the way we should, so we don’t really know each other, even if we think, we are really close.
Someone just is to lazy to think about a nice present. He/She just looks up the occasion and the relation to the person in his personal “list for gift ammounts” (”Well … lets see… Sister, Chirstmas… makes 20€. Got it”) and is done with the gifts.
I think the last one is the most sad one and the one we should carefully take a look at. Again, why do we give away gifts? Because we want to show people we like that we care about them and that they are important to us. If I read over the 4 reasons again, I realize, that they match this cause less, the more I read on (from top to bottom). Money is not a nice gift anyway… and its not the thing we should care about so much. We should rather be thinking of what to give someone to make him or her happy.
Over the years one could watch in the media and public, how the demands of most people on presents grew. Presents have to be more expensive and spectecular (and … of cause fancy and cool), so the ad’s tell us what to buy. Videogames for our children, A coffee machine for our loved one, lottery lots (which are the nearest thing to money anyway and try to tell us that we give away a luck and happiness, but all we give away is avarice and envy) for close friends. I think its horrible. I was in a video game shop some days ago to look for a Dreamcast game and saw a “christmas pack”. An X-Box Box bundled with two beat em up games (like Tekken or Street Fighter… you might know) On the bundle , there was a huge sticker “Christmas Pack! Make your Children happy”. Then… happy christmas eve, Imagine the boys are beating each other up in front of the TV while the girl practices her “new role” as a housewife with her new baby born kitchen set. The father and the mother fight over the “Sonsoreo” (name changed) coffee machine and grandma and grandpa are sitting at the chirstmas table, embarressed taking some tiny pieces of the meal leftovers, remembering old days, when it all was so great…
lets ask again, where has christmas gone? Perhaps it is at the christmas markets … or lets call it christmaxx shopping events, cause its got nothing to do with the old fashioned christmas markets. Today, hudeldudel-music from a badly recorded tape tries to push us into buying some stuff we’ll never need. What have padded animals to do with christmas? I don’t know. And when the shop owners complain about the christmas business, that wasn’t so well this year again, its a riddle to me, how they can expect, that people give away large amounts of money on Christmas. The institutions with commercial interrests lay out the christmas days as “some days in the year where you have to spend lots of money in the shops”… the original more emotional aims of christmas, like remembering love and happiness drift into background.
Why do we let them come through with that? Perhaps, we lost sight of our emotional side? Why? You don’t have to be religious to take christmas as chance to end old fights, to remember old friends etc. Its not only about shopping! Again, there are som theories, this time not sorted:
Our parents forgot to give us the real impression of christmas. They already gave us a flat unemotional impression of what christmas means. So the most of us don’t even know about the “real” christmas.
We mistook our parents in a phase, where we were not really interested in deep emotional contexts. Because of that, we don’t want to know of this context of christmas.
Media was too strong and you just couldn’t resist
No matter which way you chose, its no good. There wont be any happy days, no smiling kids, no nice celebrations. Just poor fake faces that try to say thank you.
Bring back christmas,
The Starseeker
That thing is really great. Now long winterdays may come…