"Ba Humbug!" said someone. "But I wanted something better..." said another.

            Ever since I was a young child, the holiday season, specifically Christmas, was never that grand of an event among my family and me. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we didn’t celebrate the season of gift-giving and gift-receiving; however, we, the younger members of the family, were never taught to expect a large amount of gifts. We made it a habit to enjoy the small number of gifts as they were more meaningful, and every other Christmas held a rather extravagant gift (e.g., some kind of electronic device). Sadly though, there were certain members of my family, such as my cousins, that always seemed to have high expectations on their mother when it came to Christmas. If anything, even something minuscule, came from personal experience, I could blame this first-hand exposure to the materialistic behaviors of my cousins for distorting my view upon the tradition of the holidays.

             Amel Saleh raises many points as to why Christmas might be too materialistic. With the ruining of almost any and all of the meaningful aspects of Christmas, the conditioning of our behaviors to expect any gifts at all could raise some issues with our younger generations that could lead to them maturing with materialism and greed deeply rooted in their minds ideology. Whether it is looking too far in between the lines or not, it can be quite probable, based on the statistics provided by Saleh, that younger generations could suffer from a legion of mental and personality disorders as a result of the greed and materialism that they are taught to embrace and hold on to as tradition.

             Lauren Smith states in her essay that success is measured by what material things we are capable of owning and giving to our families. The problem with this is that it strips away the true meaning of what it means to give and receive. Smith does continue to explain that it is these gifts that show that person that is receiving them that you have been thinking about them and that the giving of these materialistic gifts is done so with “love and selflessness.” If that is remotely true, it is still hard to look past the negative behaviors that many people have when it comes to giving and receiving gifts.

             My family now tends to still get together during Christmas in order to spend time with one another. This, however, has slowly been declining more and more every year, leaving myself and my direct family rather lonesome during the holidays. If anything, some of my other family members will try and find time during the following couple of days to drop off presents to anyone that was either not present or not visited during this “charitable” season. So whether it is truly love and selflessness that fuels the materialistic behaviors that spring up during the holiday months or the selfish expectation of receiving a gift, I tend to lean more towards the latter.