The holidays are approaching. Registers are ringing, twenty dollar bills are fluttering out of wallets like snowflakes. The Season of Spending is upon us yet again. Big deal.
It seems to me that every year, November rolls around and the Christmas decorations are brought out for another holiday season, people immediately launch into the same predictable annual gripes about the materialism and consumerism that seem to engulf us every winter.
The truth is, there’s little point in humbugging over the commercialization of Christmas these days. By now, we are all aware that corporations start the holiday season way too early and milk it for all it’s worth. Christmas decorations go up in stores before the Halloween candy gets discounted, and shoppers start on their Christmas lists before autumn turns to winter.
The corporate hype around “the holiday season” is less menacing than the ways marketing constantly pervades our lives the whole year round. At least during Christmas everything is out in the open. People buy gifts for one another in celebration of the birth of Jesus, and competition for your dollar, while still crass, at least blatantly obvious.
In a society where we introduce Santa Claus to children practically the moment they emerge from the womb, encouraging toddlers to write long wish lists to Santa and his helpers before they can properly hold a pen, how can we realistically expect people to restrain their holiday spending? No spending means no gifts, and despite what Dr. Seuss would have you believe, no gifts means no Christmas.
But what’s really frightening is what goes on the rest of the year, when retailers’ agendas are not so obvious. Sure, every business’s goal is to make money, but the ways in which we are duped out of our money on a regular basis is truly frightening evidence of the power of marketing.
We are all familiar with MasterCard’s infamous TV ad campaign. It uses a phrase traditionally used to deplore materialism and spending—“Money can’t buy you everything” —and cleverly appropriates for their profit-driven agenda: “There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else there’s MasterCard.”
Each commercial typically features a “priceless” moment at the end, which contrasts with all the other expenses that appear at the bottom of the screen throughout the commercial. The company’s message seems to be “Money can’t buy happiness…but actually yes it can. So get a MasterCard.” This insinuation is despicable, and is a prime example of how businesses have no problem banking on human emotions for their own gain.
Anyone who bemoans the orgy of buying around Christmastime must be forgetting all of the other unnecessary spending we do on a regular basis, a lot of it on ultimately useless things.
Starbucks has cleverly convinced us that a coffee is worth $5 and a 20-minute line-up. How many of us raced to get the new touch-screen iPod when it came out, because I mean, come on—it has a touch screen!
We are all constant targets of some marketing campaign or advertising strategy, not just at during the holiday season. It’s simply inescapable in the world we live in. But too often, we fall victim to these machinations when we really don’t have to. Instead of launching into the same old complaint about commercialization and materialism of the holiday season, we should instead open our eyes to the hundreds of ways we are lured out of our money on a regular basis, and resist them.
