I’ve got the Black Friday blues

All advertisements, no matter how well crafted or clever or ingratiating, utilize essentially the same strategy: They make you feel anxious, guilty or bad about yourself unless you buy some junk you don’t need. Christmas is an ad beyond the most hubristic and cynical dreams of any depraved Madison Avenue genius, an annual event whereby everyone in the entire nation is doomed to feel ashamed unless they spend more than they can afford on things the recipients will probably return. I just learned that the average American family spends $500 annually on Christmas shopping. This seems like a lot to me. And this is all on stuff like Bert and Ernie pajamas in adult sizes, decorative gallon cans of sugar cookies, Minecraft and Pokemon, Xboxes and Snuggies. It’s effectively mandatory consumption. We are, after all, a nation of shoppers now. Since America stopped making anything and all the real jobs got outsourced, our new national industry, our only remaining use as a people, is buying crap.

Compulsive acquisition, like overeating or addiction, is a symptom of a deep emptiness. Buying crap is a kind of existential hedge. Our things have a permanence that we lack, and by surrounding ourselves with impressive and pricey stuff, we’re trying to wall ourselves off from time, like pharaohs entombed with all their gilded and lapis-inlaid knickknacks. It makes a morbid sort of sense that the holiday season that begins with Black Friday’s avaricious frenzy ends with New Year’s Eve, when we get wasted in the face of time’s passage. I think what we’re trying to buy with that 500 bucks a year is the past — memories, more memories like the ones we have (or think we have or think we’re supposed to have) of our childhoods. We’re trying to buy back that sense of crazed anticipation that’s long since turned to grown-up obligation and regret.

I still vividly remember getting the Christmas present, circa 1975, that I had hardly dared hope I might really get: Hugo, Man of a Thousand Faces, a sort of bald ventriloquist’s dummy who came with a lot of rubber prosthetics you applied with spirit gum — there’s even Super 8 home-movie footage of my astonished reaction and Hugo’s wig falling off. What I don’t remember is actually ever playing with Hugo a whole lot. Eventually we all learn that the brief buzz of Getting doesn’t have much to do with the boring experience of Having. Ultimately, buying stuff doesn’t help any more than drinking, and each comes with its own brand of hangover. A Christmas moment that’s seldom commemorated is the dazed letdown that sets in sometime late morning or early afternoon on Christmas Day. If Norman Rockwell were still alive, he could do a really depressing painting of this scene: the living room rug strewn with wrapping paper, plastic and Styrofoam packaging, unhappy Dad trying to figure out how to hook all this stuff up, the kids already bored with their new toys and stupefied in front of a screen, the grown-ups clearly worrying about the bills and yearning for something a lot stronger than eggnog. Everyone secretly wondering, “What the hell was all that for?”

A common news story from a couple of years ago was that the recession was adversely affecting the holiday retail season. The officially sanctioned newsperson face to accompany this story was Earnest Concern. I, a godless and unpatriotic person, secretly thought, Good! Maybe instead of buying crap, people will make things for each other or do nice things for each other or just spend time with one another or maybe just enjoy their Christmas vacation for once instead of spending it all in a mall parking lot. It was like the staycations of the same era, wherein, instead of fleeing to St. Kitts, people were forced to hang around in their own lives for a couple of weeks, find out what their hometowns had to offer and have fun with one another.

A friend of mine has lately been suffering bouts of terrible clarity while doing the dishes or changing her kid’s diaper, in which she suddenly understands that she is going to die. She has, in reaction, begun ruthlessly purging her house of clutter, especially useless memorabilia — the seating chart from her wedding, autumn leaves pressed by her husband’s aunt, 20-year-old old love letters from me. We cling to these things, she says, only out of some delusion that by holding on to them, we’re not losing our past. This is magical thinking, the grown-up version of elves and reindeer; the past is gone. We have only the present moment, for whatever we can make it worth. Our stuff is just junk. Purging is the opposite of shopping, which first feels compulsively fun but leaves you depressed and empty. Getting rid of stuff feels initially scary. You’re absurdly reluctant to part with things you’ve been keeping in a box in a closet for 10 years. But then, once they’re gone, you feel better, cleaner and free.

Jesus of Nazareth said, pretty unequivocally, that if you really wanted to be a good person, you should sell off all your things and give the money to welfare mothers and bums and that rich people are damned. He once physically assaulted some small businessmen he found taking canny advantage of the sacred. It’s hard to envision his reaction if he could see his own birth honored with a vast marketing scam. But Christmas is of course only the latest incarnation of an ancient holiday. Before it was ever co-opted by the current deities, Jesus and Mammon, the winter solstice was celebrated with festivals for as long as human beings have kept track of the skies and seasons. It’s the moment when things have gotten as dark as they’re going to get, when the long night starts to shorten and the shadows recede. At my own most optimistic, least Scrooge-like moments, I like to imagine that now is the Black Friday of our discontent, the height of our own lethal shopping spree, and that after the inevitable post-binge crash, an American Spring might not be far off.