Essays in Idleness

Commercialism is at its most obscene when it is allied with a spiritual festival. This is most noticeably so at Christmas, throughout what was once Christendom. I am not referring to Christmas carols or carollers, unless the tinkling is piped in recordings, and set to “repeat.” The coarse iniquity is brought home to us in the supermarkets and shopping malls, by the repertoire of pert, vacuous numbers with catchy tunes. Many of these songs, through recent decades, do not even trill “Merry Christmas,” but a frivolous, shallow, and meaningless mirth. This follows one around, while fetching groceries, like filth in one’s mouth and ears.

A violent response, such as Christ offered to the merchants and the money changers during the cleansing of the temple, will perhaps be rejected as inappropriate, but only because no temple service could be imagined in a specialized shopping domain.

The idea of shopping for gifts is, for the most part, also morally wrong. There is a traditional season of gift-giving through the twelve days of Christmas, but the replacement of the Sacrifice of the Mass on Christmas Day, by a commercial vomitation, should surely be permanently ended. Neither commerce, nor cheap sentimentality, should have been let near this rejoicing.