The holiday season surrounding Christmas is full of our most enduring traditions. We confirm our beliefs and values with traditions like community tree lighting ceremonies and Santa Claus parades. We pass on customs from generation to generation such as holiday cookie recipes, outdoor house decorations and ugly sweaters. Christmas holiday traditions bring us comfort and sureness in a world that often offers the opposite..
Over time our holiday traditions keep changing, and lately they’ve been changing a lot, and we don’t always like it.
Remember when the real Santa Claus sat on a throne at Sears & Roebuck? Now, Sears is going bankrupt and closing all its stores, just like Toys R Us did earlier this year. More than 8,000 stores closed last year on America’s main streets and in shopping malls.
It was just a few short years ago we started the custom of camping in long lines in front of big box stores for Black Friday. We gleefully stormed the doors the day after Thanksgiving, and sometimes we even got into wrestling matches with other shoppers. How nostalgic is that? Now, we mostly stay home and do all our Black Friday shopping on our smart phones.
The twelve days of Christmas are now replaced by Cyber Monday, Small Shop Saturday, Giving Tuesday and FedEx Friday.
This year, according to the National Retail Federation, American holiday shoppers will spend over $1 trillion for the first time. Some $8 billion of that was spent this past Black Friday and another $6.6 billion was expected to be spent during Cyber Monday. It’s not that Christmas all of a sudden has become commercialized; it’s more about how impersonal and unspiritual it has become.
Online shopping will increase by 16.6 percent this year, another year of double-digit growth for Amazon, eBay and other cyber and digital outfits. That is not good news for our local independent retailers. And it’s not good news for other segments of our community that rely on local jobs, support for nonprofits and economic vitality.
The convenience of clicking our smart phones for an Amazon delivery comes with many tradeoffs. Ask yourself how much “Christmas magic” comes with your digital desires. Amazon’s Alexa just doesn’t have the same enchantment as Santa’s elves now does she?
Even the Grinch finally learned his lesson about the real magic of Christmas when the Whos of Whoville still sang and celebrated even without their gifts and presents stolen by the Grinch.
We still share wonderful holiday traditions here, like our plaza and town green tree lightings and the arrival of Santa Claus by fire truck. We’ve added a few traditions like lighted truck parades and sing-along Messiahs. We still have local holiday crafts and church bazaars. We make extra effort to share our holiday spirit with toy and food drives.
Christmas and Dec. 25 are still more than three weeks away. Each of those days is an opportunity to do our gift shopping close to home, in person and with a locally owned business. You don’t have to camp in line to find the best local treasures and unique gift items. And you don’t have to play bumper cars in busy big town parking lots.
If we don’t frequent the local shops and businesses in our downtowns, we will not have a place for Santa to visit in the near future.
How America shops and does its retail business is at a cultural crossroads right now. If Amazon drones replace Santa’s flying sleigh and reindeer, we will have lost the real traditions and customs of the Christmas season. If we need Google to search for “holiday magic,” what’s the point?
