When I was in ninth or tenth grade, I wrote an opinion editorial (“op-ed” in the biz) about how Christmas had become so commercialized. This was over thirty-five years ago, and I was such a naive child back then. I thought I had seen the height of consumerism, but I had seen nothing yet.
I loved Christmas as a kid, of course, because I got presents. That was it. No other reason. Just the presents. My brother and I would snoop around to find them before Chrismas. We also found things I’d rather not know existed, but that’s the danger of snooping.
Christmas was oddly disappointing, though, even back then. Well, not oddly. It makes sense when you think about it. When you’re a little kid, a year is such a big chunk of your life. It takes forever to get from one Christmas to another.
Then, Christmas lasted a couple hours an was over for another year. Even if you got everything you wanted for Christmas, there was still the yawning emptiness afterwards because material goods did not fulfill you permanently. This was obvious–now. Not to a little kid who waited all year to get whatever the toy of the year was. To be honest, I didn’t even remember what I got for presents. I knew they were what I asked for or what my mother would think a girl would want (if it was the latter, then it wasn’t what I wanted). I didn’t really remember.
What I did remember was one year, there was nothing in my stocking. I told my mother about it, and she told me to go back to bed. Fifteen minutes later, she called me to the stocking (and my brother, too, probably) and there were things in it. That was my first inkling that Santa wasn’t real.
Then, I started hating Christmas. There were two reasons for this. One, my fractious relationship with Christianity. I left it when I was twenty and had sex for the first time. I didn’t really believe before that, but I tried so hard. But my mother’s particular brand of hardcore fundie evangelical Christianity never sat well with me–especially the terrible sexism of it all.
When I realized they were lying about sex (that premarital sex was the worst thing you could do and would cast your soul into eternal hell), there was no going back. When someone llies to you that consistantly, persistantly, and without remorse, all the trust was gone.