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Society should embrace holiday consumerism, spending |
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Tuesday, 04 December 2007 |
Ahh, Christmas.
The word nearly reeks of the delicious aromas of the holiday season—the thick perfume of department store spritzes, the fresh-from-the-factory fragrance of newness.
From the first feeling of cold breezing through Boone, my thoughts immediately fall upon an anticipation of my delight during the holidays.
While some unfortunate Scrooges choose to bash the obvious nature of
the season with discussions of “true meanings” and “family time,” I
think in order to be proper post-modern thinkers and enact our cultural
situation, we should embrace this gift-giving frenzy and put our bank
accounts to good use.
Entering a discussion about a search for “true meaning” necessitates a
preliminary discussion of both “truth” and “meaning”—greatly condensed,
I should point out, as these types of discourses are ones that have
failed many a poor philosophy student.
Regardless, in this (post) post-modern era, the understanding of “truth” has become quite popular.
“Truth,” as
pointed out by my professor in a recent lecture, “is always in
quotations.” Thus, as endearing as it is for people to go on and on
about relocating the “true meaning” of the holidays, I can only wonder:
being that truth is subjective to individuals, how can one attempt to
determine a national or cultural “truth?”
Further, the idea of “meaning” being limited to a one-dimensional idea
is entirely unrepresentative of the premise of meaning itself.
“Meaning” is all-encompassing—it inherently involves the myriad of ways
in which we act out and understand our place in the world.
Positing that a widely practiced cultural ritual could even hope for a
one-dimensional “meaning” is ignoring the complexities of the ongoing
play of our present situation. When people speak of “true meaning,”
they seem to refer instead to a personal agenda wrought with value
judgments and narrow-minded theories.
Pragmatically speaking, it is important to recognize the aspects of the
holiday season that are inextricably created by and dependent upon us,
both as individuals and as a nation. After all, our capitalist economy
dictates more than just a “free market” system. Capitalism is a mode of
being in the world; it imprints our brains with a little stamp that
tells us that we are dependent upon commerce, that competition is part
of our nature, that our relationships indefinitely require the
reciprocity of the purchase/receive system.
That said, is anyone really surprised that one of our major cultural rituals involves the fetishization of gift-giving?
Do we ever do anything that doesn’t involve commerce?
We eat our produced and purchased foods together, we consistently
define ourselves by the commercial brands to which we personally
ascribe.
We imagine ourselves to be individual, while all along we are always
buying in, purchasing, subscribing to this system that owns us as much
as we own it.
Spending money is the only way we know how to act out our role upon
this Earth, and is a very important way that we locate meaning.
It is only fitting, then, that for a few months out of the year, we do
what we do best: purchase. And in doing so, we embody and embrace our
already unavoidable cultural construction.
Attempting to defy this is contrary to the nature we have created for ourselves.
Of course, holidays should be spent with family, friends or whoever
deserves the benefits of your hard-earned dollars. No one is denying
that.
You won’t get good presents if you don’t spend time with people that give them to you.
I think, though, that in the long run, we all can appreciate the joys
of being swept up in the holiday hustle and the realization in January
that we have so much less money than we ever dreamed possible.
So, students, what are you waiting for? The holiday season is upon us, and we have a whole lot of shopping to do.
Anna Donlan, a senior technical photography major from Atlanta, is a photographer.
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