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.
