Commercialization of Christmas

The commercialization of Christmas.

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The celebration of Christmas is not an indigenous practice for Filipinos.  Christmas was brought by the Spaniards and further imposed by the Americans.

Historically, native Filipinos have their own set of gods prior to the arrival of Magellan.  After the colonization, the practice, the tradition, and the culture of Christmas, along with its many mutation were unleashed upon the unsuspecting Filipinos.  This was reinforced by the arrival of the Americans with their own version of Hollywood Christmas.

The difference being that while the Spaniards have Christ as the center of the yuletide season, the Americans has cunningly replaced Christ with Santa Claus.  And currently, we now have an eclectic version of Christmas that is nowhere near the original celebratory form.

By and large, Christmas in the country is commercialized.  Everything is about consumerism.  Christmas is only as good as the good times that come via the acquisition of material things and other worldly possession of things that are not really needed but dictated by current cultural norms.

The rich will always have the best yuletide season in the country.  The poor will have the least reason to celebrate Christmas while the emerging middle class will always long for the kind of Christmas that the upper class celebrates and imitate it in their own middle class version of celebrating Christmas.

The irony is that the rich people of this country got it all wrong, the middle class is trying to imitate the upper class which is wrong in the first place and the poor is wrong even before it started grasping the very concept of Christmas because of the wrong predicate and basis.

The unstated rule seems that he who has more gets to celebrate the best of the yuletide season.  It is all about acquisition.  It is all about the buying and spending during this yuletide season.

The sad part is that happiness is always difficult to extract from material possessions.  A temporary one might assuage the appetite to acquire goods but in the long haul – one is always chasing shadows of contentment.  Never the real thing.

The wealthiest man on the planet pledges to give 90% of his material wealth to philanthropy.  The second wealthiest man on the planet promises to do the same and recently, the founder of Facebook promises to give 99% of his Facebook shares to charity.

Psychologically, this indicates that even the wealthiest class of the planet extracts no joy and pleasure in their material possessions.  There seems to be an emptiness that hounds and afflict these individuals.  Accumulation of wealth is not enough anymore.    

 

And yet, the very poor are trying to be rich just so they could chase the elusive Filipino concept of happiness brought about by wealth and possession.

Rich people are wrong, middle class people are also wrong and the poor – are still wrong by virtue of copying and chasing the tail of the very rich.  Even in the level of being wrong, the poor gets the lousy end of the stick.