Bah Hum Bug or Something Like it

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I haven’t really been in to Christmas since probably high school. My dad is a devout atheist who hates religion and my mother is a lapsed Jew. My dad’s side of the family is Italian Catholic and though they’ve attended midnight Mass and all of that jazz, I can’t say we’re the most religious family going. Most folks in my family see the holiday season as both a curse and a blessing. We love each other very much but get annoyed by all of the pomp and circumstance that goes along with it.

Thoughtful gifts have been replaced with Amazon wish lists, gift cards, or money.

The once mighty and tall Christmas tree that lit our living room like a miniature Rockefeller Center has been replaced with what can only be described as a colorful bush.

We’ve never put up Christmas lights around the house preferring to spend our time doing other important things…like looking at dirty pictures on the internet and gossiping on the phone : P

Needless to say, though we love each other very much and enjoy spending the holidays together, Christmas just doesn’t mean as much to as it once did when I was a child.

Then I met my beautiful fiancé. Her idea of decorating for Christmas is that our house should look like Santa’s winter wonderland exploded all over our living room. This chick has got not one but something like 5 trees of various sizes, one of which is 10 feet tall. The medium size tree is 6 feet. There’s enough garland and lights strung up around our house to tie down Gulliver. And I haven’t gotten to the outside lights that took not one day but 2 days and three adult men to hang up (and she still has more stuff to put up out there). Look, my lovely woman even has 3 festive holiday outfits for our Pomeranian.

Clearly we have two different philosophies when it comes to celebrating the alleged birth of our lord Jesus Christ…you remember him don’t you? He’s the guy that this holiday is supposed to be about.

Anywho, she looks at my family and me and thinks we are lacking in the spirit of the holiday. To her and many others Christmas should be as big and monumental as possible. There should be cards and cookies, big trees and bright lights, and an endless river of gifts bought with love (and credit…lots and lots of credit).

I see the celebration of the holiday as something that should be tad subtler. I think the whole business with the lights and all is the height of vanity. I can remember decorating our tree as a child as being a sort of haphazard but exercise in family togetherness. Decorating the 10-foot monster this year with the soon-to-be Mrs. Radulich was like two artists trying to paint on the same canvas. It was an example of something that can only be described the height of vanity.

In my opinion, that is what this holiday has become. A long, on-going exercise in vanity – the very thing Jesus was against. Now out of respect for those such as my lovely partner who enjoy this sort of thing, I generally keep my mouth shut because we are talking about a subjective matter that really doesn’t harm too many people in the grand scheme of things. However, after reading the following article, I have been vindicated.

For those who feel like Christmas costs the earth, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has a message - it actually does.

ACF executive director Don Henry said the result of the foundation's first analysis of the environmental impact of Christmas spending shocked him.

The University of Sydney-calculated data found December sales of typical Christmas goods - confectionary, alcohol, household appliances, clothes and books and magazines - created 2,861,000 tonnes of greenhouse gasses and used 100,000 megalitres of water.

All those too-tight jumpers, ugly bedspreads and tacky ornaments that miss their mark at Christmas and end up stashed at the back of the closet were not just a waste of money, they also were laying waste to the environment, Mr Henry said.

He said figures showed an increase in Australian Christmas spending over the past five years, climbing to a predicted $30 billion this year.

"There is a spike in consumption (at Christmas), there is a spike in the impact on the environment," Mr Henry said.

"We are almost overconsuming."

The Hidden Cost of Christmas found spending just $30 on chocolate santas and candy canes also cost 940 litres of water, created 16kg of greenhouse gasses and disturbed 26 square metres of land.

The boozy holiday season leaves water catchments as well as merrymakers the worse for wear, using up 42,000 Olympic sized swimming pools full of drinking water to produce the Christmas tipple.

And the $1.5 billion Australians spent on clothes last Christmas required more than half a million hectares of land to produce, while the $1.5 billion spent on electrical appliances generated 780,000 tonnes of greenhouse gasses before they were even plugged in, the ACF figures show.

It is this sort of vanity that led to the collapse of Easter Island’s civilization.

When the first Europeans visited the island in the eighteenth century it was completely treeless apart from a handful of isolated specimens at the bottom of the deepest extinct volcano crater of Rano Kao. However, recent scientific work, involving the analysis of pollen types, has shown that at the time of the initial settlement Easter Island had a dense vegetation cover including extensive woods. As the population slowly increased, trees would have been cut down to provide clearings for agriculture, fuel for heating and cooking, construction material for household goods, pole and thatch houses and canoes for fishing. The most demanding requirement of all was the need to move the large number of enormously heavy statues to ceremonial sites around the island. The only way this could have been done was by large numbers of people guiding and sliding them along a form of flexible tracking made up of tree trunks spread on the ground between the quarry and the aha. Prodigious quantities of timber would have been required and in increasing amounts as the competition between the clans to erect statues grew. As a result by1600 the island was almost completely deforested and statue erection was brought to a halt leaving many stranded at the quarry. (More)

I get that we should be able to have fun during the holidays and get into the spirit if things but once again, Western society can’t seem to get a handle on its excesses. Just how much are we going to pollute this earth attempting to prove to one another who has the biggest penis? It’s the same mentality that has people driving hummers to work when they living in the suburbs.

I’m not trying to be a Scrooge but when it comes to ones affection for the holidays causing environmental degradation I have no problem saying, bah hum bug!