I have a friend -a dual-income-no-kids fellow, who lives a happily hedonistic life in Southern California - who confessed to me the other day that he finds the entire holiday gift-giving season aggravating in the extreme.
A cheerfully materialistic atheist, he has no objection in principle to the transformation of Christmas from a sacred religious observance into an orgy of unbridled consumerism. What annoys him is the absurdity of having to buy 30 gifts for various family members and co-workers, when the only gifts he actually enjoys giving are those he picks out (with great care) for his wife.
All the rest of it is nothing but a series of tiresome social obligations, supposedly disguised as symbols of the "holiday spirit," when with every passing year the holiday spirit is increasingly likely to be crushed in the struggle to find a parking spot at the mall.
The so-called Christmas shopping season, he pointed out, now starts the day after Halloween if not earlier, while the media actually treat things like stores opening at midnight on the day after Thanksgiving as legitimate news events.
His complaints reminded me of what was once one of the most popular pieces of American Christmas literature, William Dean Howells' story Christmas Every Day. Published in 1892, at a time when Howells was considered perhaps America's leading man of letters, Christmas Every Day was as well-known in its time, and indeed for decades afterward, as the story of the Grinch is today.
The story is essentially How the Grinch Stole Christmas in reverse. It features a little girl who likes Christmas so much she asks the Christmas Fairy to make it Christmas every day. Her wish is granted, and at first she's delighted to find new presents every morning under a perpetually decorated tree, and to gorge herself every evening on yet another holiday feast.
The little girl soon discovers, however, that Christmas every day has some unpleasant economic consequences at what social scientists would call a structural level: "After a while they had to make Christmas trees out of rags. But there were plenty of rags, because people got so poor, buying presents for one another, that they couldn't get any new clothes, and they just wore their old ones to tatters. They got so poor that everybody had to go to the poorhouse, except the confectioners, and the storekeepers, and the book-sellers."
The bad effects of having Christmas every day aren't merely economic - they're also, social, psychological and spiritual: "About the beginning of October the little girl took to sitting down on dolls wherever she found them - she hated the sight of them so, and by Thanksgiving she just slammed her presents across the room. By that time people didn't carry presents around nicely anymore. They flung them over the fence or through the window, and, instead of taking great pains to write 'For dear Papa,' or 'Mama' or 'Brother,' or 'Sister,' they used to write, 'Take it, you horrid old thing!' And then go and bang it against the front door."
In desperation, the little girl asks the Fairy to please stop Christmas from ever coming again. The Fairy quite sensibly points out that asking to never have Christmas at all is in its own way as greedy as asking for it to come every day. After thinking about it, the little girl decides that it would be best if Christmas came only occasionally - perhaps one day a year.
A nation drowning in a sea of maxed-out credit cards and zero-down adjustable-rate mortgages might be tempted to agree.
Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.
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