By: David Dudley

Economic soothsayer Lucy Van Pelt, in A Charlie Brown Christmas, correctly observed back in 1965 that Christmas is a big commercial racket. So, with apologies to that unnamed Eastern syndicate that runs the holiday, is there really anything else to say about the consumerist orgy that is American life during the next four weeks?

Apparently, yes. In Shoptimism, an exhaustive new taxonomy of the American shopper, journalist Lee Eisenberg traces the historic forces behind the postwar boom in mass consumption—the transformation of the United States into what historian Lizabeth Cohen called a “Consumers’ Republic.” Eisenberg writes, “In this new political and economic order, to be middle-class and white was to inherit a freshly minted unalienable right: the pursuit of stuff.”

The subtitle of Eisenberg’s book (“Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What”) hints of where he feels this is heading: Despite current hand-wringing about the recession-era dip in consumer spending, the American will-to-shop is a resilient force. And it’s not a force for unalloyed good. If you watch Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff (or read Marc Steiner’s “Keynote” interview on page 36), you may well conclude, as she has, that Western-style consumer capitalism—particularly the supercharged variant practiced in the United States—is the economic equivalent of a mile-wide asteroid hurtling toward the eastern seaboard: If everyone else on Earth bought as much crap as the average American, Leonard says, we’d need five planets’ worth of resources. Ponder that physics lesson in the parking lot at Target this weekend. 

And yet, carping about holiday shopping has become almost as irritating a ritual as the shopping itself. It’s hard not to notice that most of the folks who espouse the Zen-like tenets of buy-nothingness seem to be drawn from a fairly privileged socioeconomic class, despite their self-imposed austerity. When simplicity is sold as a kind of luxury, one can’t expect much serious social change to come of the principled decision to change toilet paper brands or trade the H2 for a Prius. You’re just finding another way to use the mechanics of consumption to feel good.

A friend of mine never misses the opportunity to gripe about how hateful he finds holiday shopping. This is what gives him joy, just as surely as the less enlightened will take pleasure in finding new Zhu Zhu Pets™ on Christmas morning. I hew to a middle ground: Holiday shopping, for all its folly and uselessness, at least forces gifters to briefly put the needs of others before their own (assuming you classify robot hamsters as a need) and is thus a worthy exercise, especially in a society that has elevated self-indulgence to something of an art.

“When did shopping become so fraught with economic and moral consequences?” asks Rob Hiaasen in “No Returns,” his personal inquiry into the new landscape of post-affluenza America (p. 40). On the trail of Homo Economicus, Hiaasen ponders the ethics of impulse buying and concludes that the consumer of the future may indeed be a different creature than the devourer-of-worlds we have come to know. Elsewhere in our holiday gift grab bag, Rafael Alvarez makes a case for skipping the personal electronics section and cooking up your own gifts this year (“Holiday on a Plate,” p. 63), and I weigh in on It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s timely take on capitalist excess (“Last Exit to Pottersville,” p. 73).

Here in the historic cradle of the enclosed shopping center, perhaps it’s appropriate that my Christmases past appear now as a series of scenes from checkout lines: There I am, maybe 8, begging my dad to stop at the drug store on Christmas Eve so I can buy a cheap brass flower vase for Mom (she still has it); there I am, in high school, sliding around town in a raging snow squall trying to score a hard-to-find Mojo Nixon album for my brother before the stores close (ditto). Buying last-minute junk is such an inseparable component of the season’s rites that I’m all but helpless to consider an alternative. But I certainly hope, for the sake of our collective Christmases future, that there is one to be had.

—David Dudley





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