Happy Thanksgiving. As this is the most American of holidays, it is fitting that its meaning should evolve and take on different significance for each passing generation. Where settlers once gave thanks for the sustaining gifts of the harvest, Americans in later years paused to celebrate freedom from want in this much-blessed land and later still we used Thanksgiving as an opportunity to gather far-flung relations together again at the family homestead.
Today, many of us commemorate Thanksgiving by fortifying our bodies with carbohydrates so we may endure a three-day ordeal of shopping which will commence at 10 a.m. tomorrow. I’m going to give in to that; I’m going to acknowledge the hegemony Christmas swings over the head of Thanksgiving in the hierarchy of holidays. I could, and possibly should, launch into a dirge about the commercialization of Christmas and inveigh against all the cash we’ll spend in the next five weeks. But I’m not going to do that. I just want to give your Christmas shopping a little nudge and this is it: I’m going to ask you not to shop at “Toys R Us.”
Earlier this year, federal investigators accused “Toys R Us” of price fixing, of using their buying power to bully toymakers into giving “Toys R Us” exclusive opportunities with some of the most popular toys on the market. Now, the toymakers can look out for themselves, but the consumer is the one who gets shafted by such restraint of trade. This is bad enough, and while I sincerely hope the feds nail these guys to the wall, I wasn’t seriously angry until a few weeks ago when I opened the newspaper and read that “Toys R Us” is doing away with Santa Claus.
Like Thanksgiving, Christmas in America has changed, from a religious celebration to a secular holiday and among its most cherished rituals is the children’s department store visit with Santa Claus. Instead of speaking to a real person in a false beard and a red suit, children who visit “Toys R Us” this holiday season will be allowed to enter their name in a gifts registry and then trudge through the store with a scanner, electronically identifying those toys they would like to add to their horde on Christmas morning.
A more repulsive sight and a worse lesson for our children I cannot imagine. While the true meaning of Christmas was thrown from the sleigh many years ago, some vestige, some excuse, some pale spirit of Christmas has been kept around as a sprig of holly to hide our naked greed. Indeed, this scenario does violence to my whole idea of gift giving. As I review my childhood, I realize the greatest gifts I have received have not been the gewgaws I was coerced into coveting by the slick marketing of a retailer, but those things I didn’t even know existed, gifts that expanded my world and gave me new insight to myself and my situation. How poor will our children’s Christmas memories be if all they recall is that they did or did not have a souvenir of the contemporary fad?
These words, from the New York Sun, are celebrating their 100th Christmas. They bear repeating:
“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.”
There is No Santa Claus
Happy Thanksgiving. As this is the most American of holidays, it is fitting that its meaning should evolve and take on different significance for each passing generation. Where settlers once gave thanks for the sustaining gifts of the harvest, Americans in later years paused to celebrate freedom from want in this much-blessed land and later still we used Thanksgiving as an opportunity to gather far-flung relations together again at the family homestead.
Today, many of us commemorate Thanksgiving by fortifying our bodies with carbohydrates so we may endure a three-day ordeal of shopping which will commence at 10 a.m. tomorrow. I’m going to give in to that; I’m going to acknowledge the hegemony Christmas swings over the head of Thanksgiving in the hierarchy of holidays. I could, and possibly should, launch into a dirge about the commercialization of Christmas and inveigh against all the cash we’ll spend in the next five weeks. But I’m not going to do that. I just want to give your Christmas shopping a little nudge and this is it: I’m going to ask you not to shop at “Toys R Us.”
Earlier this year, federal investigators accused “Toys R Us” of price fixing, of using their buying power to bully toymakers into giving “Toys R Us” exclusive opportunities with some of the most popular toys on the market. Now, the toymakers can look out for themselves, but the consumer is the one who gets shafted by such restraint of trade. This is bad enough, and while I sincerely hope the feds nail these guys to the wall, I wasn’t seriously angry until a few weeks ago when I opened the newspaper and read that “Toys R Us” is doing away with Santa Claus.
Like Thanksgiving, Christmas in America has changed, from a religious celebration to a secular holiday and among its most cherished rituals is the children’s department store visit with Santa Claus. Instead of speaking to a real person in a false beard and a red suit, children who visit “Toys R Us” this holiday season will be allowed to enter their name in a gifts registry and then trudge through the store with a scanner, electronically identifying those toys they would like to add to their horde on Christmas morning.
A more repulsive sight and a worse lesson for our children I cannot imagine. While the true meaning of Christmas was thrown from the sleigh many years ago, some vestige, some excuse, some pale spirit of Christmas has been kept around as a sprig of holly to hide our naked greed. Indeed, this scenario does violence to my whole idea of gift giving. As I review my childhood, I realize the greatest gifts I have received have not been the gewgaws I was coerced into coveting by the slick marketing of a retailer, but those things I didn’t even know existed, gifts that expanded my world and gave me new insight to myself and my situation. How poor will our children’s Christmas memories be if all they recall is that they did or did not have a souvenir of the contemporary fad?
These words, from the New York Sun, are celebrating their 100th Christmas. They bear repeating:
“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.”