When Christmas Falls Flat
It's just not the same anymore, is it.
We love Christmas.
Jingle Bells blaring through the speakers at midnight drive-thrus. Garlands hung in drab office spaces and on tiny apartment balconies, ten stories up. Peppermint-flavored coffee rolls out for the holidays at Starbucks, and grandmas everywhere fill up candy dishes with little chocolate reindeer and marshmallow Santas.
So, what the hell does a yard filled with lifeless inflatables have to do with Joy to the World and Peace on Earth?
I remember snow-covered curbs piled high. Cars spinning their wheels trying to get onto the road, as neighbors happily gave them a push. Rudolph nodding his head, in all his mechanical glory, on someone’s front lawn as neon signs proudly flashed NOEL in store windows.
It was glorious. It was tradition. It was Christmas.
But today, 20-foot-high inflatable Rudolphs can be found prancing on lawns, or maybe just swaying in the morning breeze, trying to stay upright after a long night. I don’t know. But when I walk through my neighborhood each morning and see the carnage, I wonder, what’s the message?
Are the old ways are just too damn expensive? That miniature scenes of the Nativity are politically incorrect, even though the holiday itself has his name in it?
Or is it like Halloween, with yards littered with 25 plastic tombstones all reading RIP, with one disembodied hand reaching up out of a grave – sort of.
Are we as a society just going through the motions?
Holidays have become iconic without the fervor, childhood enthusiasm, or unbridled joy we once had as we went about sipping eggnog, noshing on baked goods at the doctor’s office, and otherwise being filled with the spirit of Christmas.
Today, it’s all about Black Friday and Cyber Monday and the endless extensions as retailers, perched high above the fray, tally their annual sales, while wringing their hands and whispering hopeful prayers to the Gods of Commerce that this year will be better than last.
And if it’s not? If the numbers don’t match expectations and stocks slide just a bit for the shortfall, well, we’ll make up for it during Easter’s Blockbuster Sales events and Welcome to Summer Extravaganzas until the coffers are where they should be.
Jobs are assured. Vacations paid for and Wall Street can claim this year to be the most profitable since President Nixon rode a reindeer in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade*.
We’ve lost the plot.
We’re phoning in the holiday cheer and pretending that we’re just as happy as when we were 10, in the hopes that others will get equally enthused and, through some heroic act of osmosis, we’ll all get imbued with the holiday spirit.
And maybe that’s just the way it’s going to be.
Easier to push the inflatables into a large sack and store them in the garage, then dismantle Santa, his sleigh, and his nine reindeer and try to Tetris them into the attic for another 11 months.
Even the old Santa and reindeer made of whatever durable materials back in the 60s and 70s would fall over now and then, or disappear in the back of someone’s pick-up. However, having everything made inflatable with electric pumps whirring in the background somehow has made holidays seem packaged or, at best, a bit contrived.
We’re not really expecting Santa, or Saint Nick 4.0, to come down the chimney even if we had one. We have carefully eliminated all the frivolous and spontaneous bits of Christmases past and left intact the more commercially viable aspects of it.
Keep the stores busy. Keep those gray Amazon trucks swooping in, like those fluffy owls in Harry Potter. And keep the bottom lines buoyant and the CEOs joyous as the holiday season comes to a close.
Because dividends and bonuses depend on the outcome as accountants tally things up and, in their own way, determine who’s been naughty or nice.
I don’t mind the endless loops of Christmas songs, I really don’t. I don’t mind hearing Bing Crosby singing A White Christmas for the one-thousandth time. It feels nostalgic.
And while me and a few million kids like me didn’t really expect Santa to break into our homes and deliver bicycles and Cabbage Patch dolls, we did have a genuine attachment to the cheer and goodwill that was being spread.
It felt real and spontaneous rather than being part of a planned marketing blitz.
Christmases past were not necessarily better than today’s version. They were just less pretentious. Less choreographed, and people might just rise in song for the heck of it, rather than being prompted by YouTubers giving all of us their version of Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.
Lifeless inflatables on a lawn are not obscene or sacrilegious, nor do they openly offend our Christmas sensibilities. They remind us that Christmas and Halloween were not created for businesses to make bank.
They were put in place so that all of us can have fun. To celebrate our cultures, our beliefs, and our connection to each other.
If all we end up with are drunk-looking Santas, weaving back and forth before keeling over, then maybe we should rethink the whole thing and put Christmas on hold until the spirit and good cheer return.
*Don’t bother fact-checking; it didn’t happen, just a little creative license.
Image from Gemini AI
LOL. Yeah, I can see that! Things change, I get that, but many things have changed for the better. Don't see why we can't work toward that result.
Joe, I’ve felt like this for a while, now. No, it’s not the same. And I’m feeling neither merry nor bright, especially given that I no longer recognize my homeland. As for those inflatables? UGH. I’m sorry to get graphic, but, when theyre not “turgid,” they bring to mind gigantic, used condoms.