A scene from Netflix’s new holiday movie The Christmas Chronicles.Michael Gibson
If you’re trying to decode the mixed messages of selflessness and shopping this holiday season, don’t bother: The true meaning of Christmas is shopping. The two come wrapped as a set.
In most Santa movies that don’t includes princes, the countdown generally involves St. Nick hitting a delivery snag because of a missing sleigh, absent reindeer or some other MacGuffin. There’s a race against the clock and the heartwarming, treacly resolution invariably hinges on getting the gifts get under the tree by Christmas morning.
In Netflix’s new holiday movie The Christmas Chronicles, for example, Santa (played by Kurt Russell) keeps getting status updates through his Victorian steampunk-meets-Apple watch: “Christmas spirit is down 31 per cent!” is cause for alarm, and the more he falls behind on his route, the worse it gets. “The lower it goes, the more people get cranky, depressed, angry – and that’s when bad things start to happen. Like a lot more crime.”
Whenever he runs into trouble, our cool Santa beguiles cynical onlookers – he calls them “lost believers” – not with arguments but with nostalgia about the toys of Christmases past, the Hot Wheels, Mickey Mantle baseball cards and G.I. Joe figures they once coveted as children. It’s a similar outcome in the new animated Canadian feature Elliot: The Littlest Reindeer, where the show must go on and deliveries must be made. The preoccupation with stuff isn’t seen as greedy, but as an intrinsic part of Christmas.
Tugging at wallets and tugging at heartstrings go hand-in-pocket, er, hand. To get at the interplay between consumers, social contexts and marketing I turned to academia – specifically, Dr. Tandy Dayle Thomas, assistant professor of marketing at Smith School of Business at Queens University. Thomas studies social psychology and consumer culture and says the paradoxical situation is only natural.
“It’s about traditions, time together and lasting memories – all that feel-good stuff, which is antithetical to the shopping narrative, where marketplace has no place in the family and they are supposed to be kept separate," she says. But, Tandy adds, there’s still a sense that the holidays are not really Christmas unless you have a huge pile of presents under the tree. “And the emphasis is on the pile of kids’ presents that Santa brings them, as opposed to whether it’s really the best way to spend our precious financial resources.” The paradox of Christmas being about the spirit of kindness and sharing, and giving and consumerism, is that it’s all entangled – parents don’t buy the presents, Santa Claus does, like magic. “It’s wonderful to see [the magic] in the faces of their children, because we have these warm, fuzzy cultural rituals, which are all tied to family unity, tradition and togetherness.” But that vision of togetherness is entrenched in marketplace behaviours, so we don’t view our consumption as problematic.
I’m not a parent and I know where presents really come from, yet when it comes to the lure of gift-giving during the holiday season I find myself more susceptible to retailers’ charms, not less. Be it a casual Secret Santa swap with a $10 cap or a gift exchange among girlfriends, it’s hard to resist, though none of us needs anything. As a result I’ve been trying to embrace the mixed messaging of the holiday, or at least understand it a little better. Why should holiday shopping somehow mean more than, say, Amazon’s Prime Day?
“When we talk about any kind of gift-giving scenario, what has to be central to the discussion is relationship formation and relationship maintenance,” Thomas says. “So whether it’s between friends, co-workers, a parent and a child, couples or someone and their in-laws, what makes a lot of those relationship dynamics come into play is that the gift says a lot about the nature of the relationship.”
The complexity around engaging responsibly and being pulled into all these rituals that span relationships becomes a bigger challenge around the holidays. It’s very hard to opt out because these are cultural forces that no one is perpetuating single-handedly, Thomas reassures me. Everyone is perpetuating them. “We’re embedded in these almost competing discourses,” she says. “On the one hand, we do have what’s referred to as ‘persuasion knowledge’ – we know the companies are trying to persuade us to buy things and once you hit a certain age you understand the persuasive intent and defend against that. Part of what the marketing industry and advertising does is try to overcome your persuasion knowledge.”
Cue the weepy holiday commercial, usually the work of a supermarket or department store. They all usually play on some variation of loneliness, distance, and maybe a community coming together. British retailer John Lewis’s 2013 instalment The Bear and the Hare remains the benchmark tearjerker, about a hare who leaves a gift of an alarm clock to its hibernating bear friend so that the beast can wake up in time to enjoy Christmas morning. It’s the Super Bowl ad of Christmas messaging, its powers of persuasion all but invisible and forgotten ~ until the credit card bill arrives.
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