As the festive season draws near, people in many parts of the world
engage in frenzied bouts of shopping. We don’t just stroll into the nearest
shop and casually buy any old thing. Rather, we scour the retail outlets
for ‘appropriate’ offerings, elbowing our way through the crowds to find
the ‘right’ gifts, only to suffer pangs of doubt once we’ve lugged them
home. Individuals who deviate from this ritual – my father’s shopping typically
consisted of a dash into the local department store minutes before it closed
on Christmas Eve – are often ruefully regarded as inadequate gift-givers.
If it all seems like hard work then that’s because it’s meant to be,
says anthropologist James Carrier of the University of Virginia. Like the
British, ‘Americans commonly see Christmas shopping as an onerous task’,
he writes. ‘People regale each other with stories about how hard it is and
resolve to start earlier next year.’ Christmas has to be ‘worked at’ if
it is to be done ‘properly’.
Yet in the middle of all this intensive purchasing, we complain about
the ‘materialism’ of the holiday, the consumer hype, the hard-sell advertising,
the Marks and Spencer’s Christmas biscuits on sale in October. From Trinidad
to Sweden, the media reiterates what has become the global cliche of Christmas:
that the growing commercialisation of the holiday threatens ‘the spirit
of Christmas’. We say ‘it’s the thought that counts’, the sentiment behind
the gift rather than the material object itself that is important. Yet the
shopping intensifies all the while: Christmas purchases now account for
a sixth of all retail sales in the US.
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So why do we do it? Anthropological studies suggest that it’s all to
do with living in a ‘commodity’ culture – where we use money to buy impersonal,
mass-produced objects made for profit by people we’ve never met. Living
in the material world, we almost had to invent ‘Christmas shopping’. Performing
this ritual shows that we can build meaningful social relationships in a
world of anonymous objects, anthropologists argue.
Alien objects
Their reasoning goes like this. When we buy objects, they are transformed
and cease to be impersonal. As Carrier puts it, ‘people routinely appropriate
their purchases’, converting them into possessions that reflect their personal
identity and social relations. We ‘personalise’ a bicycle or car, ‘break
in’ shoes, transform supermarket groceries into a cooked meal for family
or friends. Even in the act of shopping, we stamp an alien object with our
identity. Christmas shopping is a heightened version of this process, Carrier
argues. It is ‘an annual ritual through which we convert commodities into
gifts’. This could even explain the emphasis on luxury items rather than
utilitarian ones – lavish, frivolous gifts are distinctly different from
the ‘necessities’ purchased at other times of the year.
But what part in all this does the hype play? ‘The consumer hype of
Christmas allows us to show ourselves how important consumption is,’ argues
Marilyn Strathern, professor of social anthropology at the University of
Cambridge. Once a year, we go out and buy for others. ‘We glut, we overdo
it, we grumble about how commercial it all is, but we are reflecting back
on the value of it all.’
Everything begins to add up when Christmas is seen in its cultural and
socioeconomic context. Like the British, ‘Americans see family and friendship
as surrounded by the impersonal world ‘out there’, the world of work and
alienated commodities,’ Carrier argues. ‘It is the Christmas shopping that
proves to them that they can create a sphere of familial love in the face
of a world of money.’ Shopping, as well as giving, is a key part of Christmas.
People go on about how hard the shopping is, and about growing commercialisation,
because these complaints help to affirm that at least once a year it is
possible to ‘wrest family values from recalcitrant raw materials’. This
way of looking at Christmas also explains why home-made objects are generally
not regarded as appropriate presents – for they deny the ritual of Christmas
shopping.
It was not always so. Christmas turns out to be a remarkably dynamic
festival, radically different in other times and places. The emphasis that
Europeans and Americans now place on emotionally charged gift-giving developed
in the wake of industrial capitalism. Christmas in its modern form emerged
in Britain and the US only in the mid to late 1800s – coinciding with intensive
industrialisation and a growing sense of the domestic sphere as a special
moral realm distinct from the harsh realities of the workplace. It was then
that the emphasis on ‘the family Christmas’ arose, spurred on by the enormous
popularity of Charles Dickens’s sentimental tale, A Christmas Carol.
The challenge we face at Christmas is to find reliable ways to transform
the mass-produced objects of the marketplace into gifts – to purchase and
yet somehow to remove the contamination of money. Carefully peeling off
every trace of the price is an essential first step. Wrapping gifts in special
paper also helps; it surrounds the commodity with sentiment and something
of the identity of the giver. The exceptions, interestingly, support the
thesis. Difficult-to-wrap gifts such as a bicycle or piano must be given
a token bow or ribbon, and be hidden away until the last moment. Home-made
jams and cakes do not need elaborate wrapping, however, as they already
bear the personal stamp of the giver.
So in a sense, Christmas can even be regarded as a ‘festival of anti-materialism’,
as Daniel Miller, reader in anthropology at University College London, provocatively
suggests. It wallows in the world of goods – but only in order to combat
what we think of as the negative consequences of this all too intimate
relationship.
Caribbean curtains
To support this perspective, Miller describes Christmas in Trinidad.
There, the house is scrupulously cleaned and often repainted – in December
paint retailers treble their normal sales. But it is curtains that really
make Christmas on this Caribbean island. At the very least everyone washes
and rehangs theirs; the more affluent replace them with a set from storage,
or even buy new ones. The closing ritual of Christmas Eve, the hanging of
the curtains, celebrates the boundary between the inside world of domesticity
and religion and the outside world, Miller argues.
Trinidadians buy gifts at Christmas primarily for the house: a dining
suite and electric fan one year, a lounge suite and stereo another. Domestic
goods bought at other times of year are carefully put away to be unveiled
at Christmas Eve. So what might have been ‘a mundane impersonal process’
of utilitarian purchasing is transformed into something much more fun: each
purchase is filled ‘with a set of positive, if complex, associations constructed
through the festival of Christmas itself’, he explains. ‘The result seems
to be less a celebration of materialism than a sacralisation of shopping.’
Commercial interests have certainly played a part in all this, however.
Christmas shopping did not just happen; manufacturers have worked very hard
to promote the idea, as Russell Belk of the School of Business at the University
of Utah has shown. According to Belk, buying manufactured goods instead
of home-made Christmas gifts did not become widespread in the US until the
1880s, when leading department stores such as Macy’s in New York began to
bombard customers with striking displays of imported dolls and other exotic
consumables. Department stores helped shoppers to overcome their qualms
about giving mass-produced objects as personal gifts by designating special
merchandise as ‘Christmas gifts’, and by introducing wrapping paper to ‘decontaminate
and singularise’ products bought in the marketplace. Santa Claus also began
to ‘serve as the god blessing Christmas materialism’, believes Belk.
The festival remains in flux. There are signs, for instance, that Christmas
shoppers are increasingly buying ‘gifts’ for themselves at this time of
year. According to Belk, in the film Scenes from a Mall, released in 1991,
‘self-gifts had become the entire focus of the shopping experience depicted’.
‘Although this extreme of Christmas self-indulgence is still not typical
in America,’ he claims, ‘it is perhaps not far removed from the spirit of
self-interest cultivated in children through a focus on Santa as a bringer
of all good things.’
Greed and hedonism
Christmas also enables adults to acquire luxuries as gifts without suffering
the concomitant guilt of self-indulgence, Belk argues. But he thinks that
the ‘mutual cleansing’ of objects in such gift exchanges risks becoming
too transparent when we ask for specific gifts or demand to know what someone
really wants for Christmas.
In Belk’s more jaundiced view of the festive season, our ability to
appropriate objects from their commercial contexts and mark them off as
gifts does not absolve us from accusations of greed or hedonism. ‘That
many of the excesses in Christmas shopping are carried out under the veneer
of love does not mean that such materialism is benign,’ he claims. In a
consumer culture, consumption is perhaps inevitably the vehicle for celebrating
family, friends and a sense of community. But Belk sees a danger of ‘terminal
materialism’ where consumption becomes the end, not the means, of celebration.
One alternative is the ‘rational’ Christmas urged on us by SCROOGE
– the Society to Curtail Ridiculous, Outrageous and Ostentatious Gift Exchanges
– founded in 1979. This American organisation encourages ‘sensible spending’
at the yuletide. Its annual newsletter suggests buying smoke alarms, first-aid
kits and gift certificates for self-improvement classes. According to Belk,
family counsellors in the US have also begun to suggest that people should
spend less time with the family at Christmas as a way of reducing stress
and conflict, and consciously try to strip gift-giving of its emotional
baggage. But Belk believes that a more rational Christmas carries its own
dangers – that of removing the ‘myth and mystery needed for sustaining a
key contemporary ritual in the home’. For many of us, he argues, Christmas
is our greatest chance for contact with the ‘numinous’ – loosely defined
as spiritual or transcendent experiences.
Miller takes a more positive view of the annual orgy of consumption,
however, suggesting that Christmas today has, in some parts of the world,
become the focus of what we might call ‘creative consumerism’. The Japanese
Christmas is perhaps the consummate example of this commercial genius in
action.
When Westerners arrived proffering their end-of-the-year celebration,
the Japanese already had well-established solstice festivals focused on
the family. Obligingly, the Western import has taken on a new identity –
in Japan Christmas Eve, or ‘Silent Night’, centres not on the family but
on the exchange of gifts between romantically inclined young couples. ‘In
recent years, Tiffany jewellery has been seen as the item to give as an
expression of romantic emotion’, according to two specialists in Japanese
culture, Brian Moeran of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London
and Lise Skov of the University of Copenhagen. ‘Tiffany’s is only found
in Mitsukoshi department store (and one or two hotels), and during the weeks
leading up to Christmas young people queue outside the prestigious section
of Tokyo’s premier department store, in order to be able to buy a diamond
there,’ they recount. Here, Christmas is entirely located in consumerism,
in mass culture. ‘For a night young couples go out to celebrate themselves,
romance and consumerism.’ The men must book tables in Tokyo’s leading European
restaurants and luxurious hotel rooms months in advance.
Yet already there are signs that even this recent ‘tradition’ is changing.
In 1991 there were signs of a shift to the ‘home party’, as the media talked
up Japan’s economic troubles. According to the trend-setters – magazine
articles and the department stores’ consumer guides to Christmas – it was
hand-knitted sweaters above all else which expressed the new mood of 1991,
and young women flocked to buy knitting kits for bulky, chunky-knit sweaters.
In the Japanese Christmas, consumerism and culture have become essentially
synonymous. But are things really that different here? ‘In the advertisers’
relentless search for fresh grounds on which people can make choices to
buy, anything can be pressed into service,’ Strathern points out. Think
of the way sportswear recently became fashionable in the high street – suddenly
even the most unathletic of individuals might wear trainers and track suits
in public. In this ‘constant multiplication of goods, which touches every
aspect of our lives, anything can be used’. One example, she says, is the
way Benetton promotes its range of clothing with images of someone dying
of AIDS.
We want to believe it could be otherwise, especially at Christmas. The
holiday is quintessentially a ‘nostalgic’ festival which purports to be
the playing out of an age-old rite, Miller contends. Thus the Swedes struggle
earnestly to discover the ‘authentic’ Christmas past – what Orvar Lofgren
of the University of Lund calls a ‘lust for ritual’ – and agonise over ‘getting
Christmas right’. Lofgren argues: ‘As a holiday it has incorporated the
main restless credo of Western modernity – things can or must always be
¾±³¾±è°ù´Ç±¹±ð»å.’
In Sweden, home-made gifts and decorations are de rigueur, precisely
because what people are most anxious about is ‘folk culture’, and a sense
of national identity and origin. In the US, home-made gifts are eschewed,
because there the anxiety centres on how to make ‘family values’ compatible
with rampant commercialism. Almost everywhere that ‘Christmas’ is celebrated,
the holiday seems to be a battleground, an arena for struggle over what
symbolic weight the festival should carry.
Wassailing for whales
Everywhere, it seems, except in Barrow, Alaska – one of seven Iupiaq
(Inuit) villages on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. There Christmas consists
of days of partying in the village’s community centre. For eight days, recounts
Barbara Bodenhorn, a Fellow of Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge,
‘people feast, sing, dance and play games with barely a moment taken out
to sleep’. The reinvented tradition of the Inupiaq Christmas focuses on
‘otherworldly’ social relations, and incorporates a much older celebration,
suppressed by Protestant missionaries, devoted to thanking the whales hunted
over the year. In this happy celebration, social tensions fall, rather than
rise as they so often do elsewhere – the Swiss even have a name for it,
Weihnachtscholer or ‘Christmas unhappiness’. In Barrow, by contrast, the
number of alcohol-related arrests falls, the Arctic Women in Crisis Shelter
has fewer emergency visits and the Children’s Receiving Home takes fewer
calls in the middle of the night, Bodenhorn reports. People feel happy during
the festival, in part because ‘no one individual is responsible for producing
the ‘proper’ Christmas spirit in Barrow’, Bodenhorn concludes. ‘The events
themselves are fluid – people may choose when, where and how to participate.’
And there are no ‘gifts’, in our sense, and no Christmas shopping.
This feature draws on anthropological views of Christmas presented in
Unwrapping Christmas, edited by Daniel Miller and recently published by
Clarendon Press, Oxford.