I'm sure most Americans have fond memories of waking up on Christmas to presents under the tree. It's a thrilling experience for everyone no matter the age. For the child, Christmas morning is a truly euphoric peak; for the parent it's a different peak, something more peaceful, more profound, more fleeting. Christmas morning moments, surely, are some of the fondest of our lives. But what if I told you that, despite those understandably warm feelings, Christmas morning amounts to little more than a sordid capitalistic ritual?
I'm not going to knock giving gifts to friends and family (at least in this post). I get the argument. Those are gifts that can actually have meaning. I'm here specifically to question whether or not a parent's lavish spending on her undeserving children every Christmas is actually a good thing for our social fabric and cultural identity.
Are the gifts really that important when it comes to our kids? It's just stuff. Beanie Babies. Cabbage Patch Kids. The Wii. A pirate castle complete with a shooting cannon that your shithead son will only play with twice. But we all know the truth: it doesn't matter how many times your son plays with the castle, it matters that he got it and you, the purposeful parent, obtained it for him, a plastic castle whose drawbridge will end up in a landfill and particles in your child's bloodstream, the toy of the year that every good little boy begged his parents for. All his friends at school got it, too. Except one. And he lives next to the plastic factory.
No single day on our American calendar calls into relief more conspicuously the staggering wealth inequality existing in this country than Christmas Day. We need to change the narrative and we need to change our culture (I know that's scary to hear). We need to decide—as a society and as a democracy—that we are done with Christmas and its deforming capitalist contortions.
How do we go about doing that? The solution, thankfully, is simple: every child gets the same gift.
Just something like $5 off your check each week, just the price of your triweekly iced latte, and it goes to a sort of National Christmas Fund which accrues interest throughout the year. All it would take is a little bit of legislation, which is a tough ask in today's political landscape, but a budget reconciliation is certainly on the table. This fund would be accessed each November and then used to buy the same gift for every child whose parent paid into the fund—say, a football.
And everybody just gets a football.
What they do with it until school starts back up is up to them. They can scrimmage in the snow, they an pretend it's a giggling baby, they can spin it on their fingertips. And the beautiful thing is that we can tune our school curriculum around these yearly Christmas gifts—after break the students can write essays about what value they did or did not find in this distinctly American object and experience.
Of course, some might make it to the NFL and some might never pick it up again after that first week but the point is everybody gets an equal chance to do something with the ball. And yes that includes girls who, if exposed to the game at a young age as so many boys are, would also be playing in the NFL.
This helps all of us. The first benefit of switching to such a system would almost instantly eliminate the pangs of capitalism that afflict us so acutely during the so-called Most Wonderful Time of the Year. I'm talking about the traffic. The congestion. The road rage. All of it. Imagine how much more relaxing the holidays would be if weren't for the rushing around, burning through gas just to hit Walmart for the seventh time since Thanksgiving like the Walton family whore.
Imagine the peace of mind you would have if your Christmas shopping was done on January 1st. You can have that for only $5 a week. All of the stress of the holiday season, evaporated in an instant. Imagine being able to focus on just spending time with your loved ones. Imagine how much better everybody's cooking would be.
But the bigger thing is the inequality. Think of the kid who walks into class on January 3 wearing his new Air Monarchs. They were his only gift. But they're pristine and pearl white and he wears them with pride. That is, until his friends start talking about their new Playstations and tell him he looks like a dad. I don't personally know what this kid might feel like because I always got more than one present on Christmas but it's not hard to put myself in his shoes. You might deserve your moment around the tree with your family but does he deserve that kind of humiliation?
We could do this, though. Start it up right now. You commit $5 a week (or more) and take a pledge to not buy any gifts next year, and then next fall, as a community, we decide on the gifts for the different age-groups. This could be the reality if we actually cared about our neighbors, and not just our 401ks, but this is America.
Cause that's the thing, we want the traffic. We want the rage. We want the pollution, the competition, the degradation of the human soul that comes with three hours of bumper to bumper traffic just to purchase a purse so that you can say that you won. It's sickening: the same-day shipping, the self-checkouts in the understaffed stores, the non-recyclable wrapping paper—the emphatic, enduring holiday jingle of buy, buy, buy ringing in our ears all December just to convince us that what we have is never enough when it's more than what many will ever have.
What if every kid just got a football?
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