X-mas 2011.

Americans will spend around 200 billion dollars this year on Christmas. The holiday that celebrates the birth of the Christian savior, the one born in a pig's trough in a 1st century shanty. And of course they will spend it on every sort of nonsense. Just over 50% of the pets in the US of A will receive gifts. At a conservative 40 dollars a pet, with 80 million pets getting gifts, that's a meager 3 billion and change. A far cry from the 41 billion annually that is spent on pets including 900+ dollar testicle implants (240k sold so far) so that your castrated pet will "retain their natural look and self esteem"..... 


There's the throngs of rabid consumers who didn't sleep on November 24. The day meant for giving thanks, a day set aside as a remembrance of the blessings that we already have in great abundance was punctuated with a night (or a week) of anxious waiting in the parking lots of giant retail meccas. Then at some ungodly hour, the veil of sliding glass was rent, the many mouths of strip malls opened wide, and the crowds pushed themselves frenzied and wild eyed into the belly of the beast. They trampled the slow and the timid, they wrenched product from the weak and the amateurish. 





I am so embarrassed to be human. I believe the article of the maniacal obsession was a $2 waffle maker. You'd of thought it was the cure for AIDS or the last cup of water on earth. If that video whets the appetite, here is a collection of some of the most egregious black Friday deaths and injuries ever. Yes. I said deaths. And all as a preamble to a day celebrating the baby Jesus. The one who had no earthly possessions. Who had no home. Who lived a life in humble servitude to the poor and the hurting. 


Yesterday, to prove that people are the worst type of brand-whores and celebrity worshipers, shoppers in North Carolina came to blows over the New Air Jordan tennis shoes. At 180 dollars a pair, a mob ran through the store's doors to be able to say that they have the new Jordans. 

Dear shoppers. Michael Jordan doesn't even play anymore. He's a 48 year old scratch golfer who cannot dunk from the free throw line anymore, not even at Chuck E. Cheeses. He doesn't know you are wearing his shoes. He doesn't even care. Well let's be honest he does care, about 180 dollar's worth, that you buy them. But he will never see you wear them, he will never stop you on the street and say, nice kicks my friend. He never will. Nope. 





How bout 200 billion on orphan relief? Even the 41 billion we spend on pets? Hell even the 3 billion we spend on gifts for our pets? How bout lining up outside of brothels and brick kilns, waiting all night to snatch kids out of the ruthless grips of traffickers and slave masters? How bout the same kinda determination that we use to acquire a 2 dollar waffle maker or even 180 dollar shoes, that kind of passion and resolve??!! If nothing else. Let's just drop the pretense. Take the name of Christ off of it all. Quit trying to add credibility to this season of product lust and tinsel worship. 


This is how I imagine hell. The smell of gingerbread and eggnog and the whole place is decked out in greens and reds and silvers and the tree is lit and there are new presents every morning and all you have to do is think it and there it is, waiting under the tree the next day. And your belly is always full and the music always soothes and the fire roars and crackles the most delightful little hisses and pops and this day repeats every day forever. And you don't have to think about the poor and the enslaved because they are not here in your perpetual X-mas. 


But then neither is Christ.