(C) OpenDemocracy This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . US holiday season leaves no room for those who struggle with the festivities [1] [] Date: 2024-02 Thanksgiving, which took place last Thursday in the United States, is a celebration with an ugly colonialist legacy that marks the unofficial start of the ‘holiday season’ in this country. This period’s brazen consumerism – the Christmas shopping frenzy kicks off mere hours after Thanksgiving – combined with messaging about kindness, generosity and even anti-consumerism generates cognitive dissonance, particularly given there is little to no recognition of those many Americans who find the enforced festivities difficult. While Black Friday, ‘celebrated’ the day after Thanksgiving, still marks the ‘official’ beginning of the holiday shopping season, these days Christmas merchandise hits the shelves before Halloween. And the panoply of days after Thanksgiving that one is supposed to observe has expanded since the mid-aughts to include Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday (for online shopping!), and Giving Tuesday (for charity!). Is the reason that no one has claimed Sunday deference to Christian tradition? Who knows. In any case, there is now so much competition for American spending in late November that one not-for-profit I support tried to get ahead of the whole thing by sending out a ‘Giving Tuesday’ email on 14 November, a full two weeks in advance, promising not to send those who donate early another email on 28 November. I can hardly blame them, and yet, to me, all this did was add to the stress that comes with so many demands for holiday spending swirling around. And the anti-consumerist messaging in popular Christmas classics like ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’ doesn’t help. Sure, maybe the Whos in Whoville realise Christmas doesn’t come from a store, but they still get back all the toys and noisemakers and holiday goodies that the Grinch stole, don’t they? They prove that they could enjoy the holiday without them, but are rewarded by getting to celebrate the day the same way they do every year, only now with a neighborly Grinch who has bought into the whole thing. What do you think? Win a £10 book voucher for sharing your views about openDemocracy. Tell us And then there’s Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’, which, over the next month, will grace American televisions in about a million different iterations and interpretations. I admit that for some time I couldn’t make sense of the play’s enduring popularity among Americans, but at some point, the answer came to me. Dickens’ message of generosity is acceptable because it is entirely paternalistic – why look to the government for political solutions to poverty and exploitative labor conditions when we can just get every Ebenezer Scrooge out there to experience a heartwarming Christmas miracle? The contradictions of Christmas-centered consumerism aside, for many Americans, myself included, the holiday season can be a source of pain or at least discomfort. This unease begins with Thanksgiving, whose origins are still taught to schoolchildren in a manner that whitewashes European colonization of North America, erases the genocide of Indigenous Americans, and encourages cultural appropriation as children act out the sharing of a meal among ‘Pilgrims’ and ‘Indians’ in their schools. For my own part, I did enjoy a large meal with friends last Thursday, but with no prayer or kitschy, colonialist Americana. I may well be that feminist atheist killjoy who spoils holidays with social criticism, but I’m not entirely ‘Bah, humbug!’. What I am, I suppose, is ambivalent. I struggle with complex mixed feelings about the ‘festive’ time of year and the ways our society marks it, and I want to use today’s column to hold space for others who can no longer simply get swept up in ‘holiday spirit.’ For some, these feelings are merely the result of growing up and losing the ‘magic’ the holidays used to bring. This, too, is a perennial theme of Christmas movies, which tend to resolve the problem with some sort of Christmas miracle that restores one’s ‘belief’, perhaps with a new romance thrown in. As I’ve said before, if the American public sphere can be said to embody a sort of civil religion, that religion is faith in faith itself. But for others, there are underlying issues, such as childhood abuse or traumas, loneliness, deaths in the family, or loss of faith that make it impossible to find joy in Christmas. The vague faithiness preached by many a kitschy Christmas movie overlooks this, as well as the fact that the centrality of Christmas at this time of year is a massive expression of Christian privilege. Indeed, the slightest public gesture toward making things more inclusive results in accusations of waging a ‘war on Christmas’ from the right. While a secular Christmas celebration is theoretically available to everyone, not everyone is comfortable celebrating a Christian holiday. Religious minority parents must sometimes make difficult decisions when their children feel peer pressure from schoolmates to celebrate Christmas. And for those of us who grew up in high-control Christianity and rejected it as adults, Christmas can bring up deep-seated religious trauma. If you find the holiday season alienating – because of excessive consumerism or any kind of trauma or family tragedy, or for any reason at all – I hope you know that you’re not alone, and that reading this might help you feel seen as we enter this uncomfortable time of year. And if you’re the kind of person who just adores the holidays, I hope you can find some empathy for those who experience more pain than joy at this time of year. If more people took steps in their holiday plans to accommodate those who have a hard time with this season instead of dismissing us as ‘Scrooges’, perhaps they might manage to spread a little goodwill and peace on earth after all. 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