Something happened on the way to Walmart

A lot has me down this past week. Mumbai has me way down. My job has me down. The deteriorating economy, my best friend and brother being out of work and consequently having to worry about money and healthcare has me down. And then there's the holiday hype, in full swing now that Thanksgiving is out of the way. I'm still half hoping that the Long Island Walmart incident was actually an Orson Wells-type experiment and the media will soon reveal the whole situation as a sham. Their apologies for any bad feelings. Because watching a news story where a mob of Walmart shoppers stampede through a door, trample a man to death, injure a pregnant woman, and then attempt to continue their bargain hunting as "they have been on line since yesterday morning" (NY Times), doesn't seem real to me. Maybe I sound naive. Or maybe a bit dramatic. After all, as far as I know, no one set out of their house at 4 am with the intention to kill--it was an "accident." I'm not so sure that matters, though. Intent would make the story less disturbing. The worst part about the situation is how oblivious this hype makes people.

I watched the story on the news a couple of days ago. In the same segment, the station went on to nonchalantly interview people in the Tri State area who were doing their Christmas shopping. Back to business as usual. One young couple had saved 2K for all their Christmas presents. 2K. That's a trip to Europe. That's a huge deal. At least for a middle class 27-year-old with rent and student loans. (That's also about the cost of one credit at NYU, so technically, who I am to judge...)

I don't want to be a hypocrite because during the holidays I start spending more than I should, too. It just happens; you love your friends and family, you want them to open a gift and you want to see their face light up. You know exactly what would do that. It's actually rather self-indulgent, but I've resolved, not in a bad way (well, at least not in most cases). For me, if that something has a high price tag, unless it's truly unreasonable, I'll get it. It's human.

I wait anxiously for the time when my mom, dad and brother are all together in our living room close to midnight on Christmas Eve. It's a quiet refuge from the emotional medley that we're coming from--yelling, laughing, fighting, singing, my mom's entire extended family, the traditional Italian 7-types-of-seafood spread, 15 little kids, a visit from Santa, Christmas carols, videos from Christmas past. We all take a breath and wind down in the glow from the lights of my mother's Fortunoff-style tree (she stopped using the kid's decorations once we were all grown up, much to my dismay), and the low buzzing of mechanical Mr. and Mrs. Claus as they loosen up their joints and dance their slow jig, candles in hand, in the front window. My grandmother's old nativity scene, a solitary little wooden barn with Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus and some hay glued into it, is always sitting at the base of the tree. We're all impulsive so there is no waiting to open gifts on Christmas morning, at least not since we stopped believing in Santa Claus. My mom eventually gets up. Here, she says and hands a box to me, and we start to open our gifts. We all watch as each one of us unwraps. It's my favorite part of the holiday, but only a certain, small percentage of it really has to do with the gifts. The gifts are more like an excuse.

Everyone knows that already though, right? We all say it and remind each other of it. It's not about the gifts. It's about being with family, whether they're blood relatives or those you have come to consider family out of pure, voluntary love. It's about Jesus's birthday, or the longest night of the year, or the miracle of the Temple, or 7-days of candle lighting in dashikis and kaftans, or adhering to the Four Noble Truths, or, or, or... For me, unfortunately, it's really nothing so profound. It's about this moment when we are sitting together with my brother Al, whom I only really see twice a year, and the two of us spend the entire time laughing and imitating my father behind his back. (Only because we love you, Dad.)

If we all know this I'm just curious as to what the hell happened. There's a line that gets crossed, or rather trampled, somewhere between gift giving for appreciation and tradition and just plain old excessiveness, which ironically minimizes the experience. Albeit, I am not married with children, I don't have to worry about the latest Nintendo Wii game that all the other kids will be getting, the toys, clothes, or Sosoandso's parents are getting him a car! I can just say, at this point, thank god I don't have to deal with all of that and this viewpoint is slightly biased towards my single woman status. I can buy gifts for my family in one shot, usually at Barnes&Noble. (Let me tell you, my nieces and nephews love me for all the books I've gotten them. Ha. They'll thank me someday.)

But, biased or not, I'm wondering how the holiday experience has snowballed (no pun intended) into debt, Christmas shopping from October on, spending weekend after weekend--time off from work for many-- in purgatorial shopping malls, stuck in traffic, stuck on lines, stuck listening to the inevitable arguments that break out both inside and outside of the stores. I remember from my days of actually having a car that drivers become full-blown crazy during this season. The excess brings about a temporary insanity. With the recession, it's understandable to perhaps go the extra mile for a bargain, to be a little neurotic about getting through the holidays when you're not even sure if you will have a job. How, though, does that translate into nearly breaking down a store door, so focused on video game value bundles, and digital cameras, and plasmas and iPod shuffles and maybe some half-priced long-johns to stick in a stocking, so absorbed in your own desires that you fail to notice you're stomping on someone at all, nonetheless to death? And injuring others along the way. I don't care how many kids you may have, how bad your finances may be (after all, everyone still seems to be shopping, right?), how frustrated you are or maybe just how much you may want to make someone else happy, a circuit was shorted somewhere along the line between reason and action.

The saddest part is that lately, it seems we have so much less vigor for the things that actually matter. Imagine if all of that crazed energy could be stored and put towards one of the 5 hundred causes that would actually be bettering society.