Christmas and New Year are the biggest holidays people celebrate annually all around the world. These holidays have good merry traditions to gather as a family, give each other presents, singing Christmas carols, and decorate the house with sparkling Christmas lights and a New Year’s tree. However, today, these traditions and customs became highly commercialized. For those families who constantly lack money for their everyday needs, Christmas and New Year may become a real headache because nowadays these holidays are quite costly. The commercial side of Christmas is well-described in Howard Nemerov’s poem Santa Claus. This paper will analyze Nemerov’s poem with a focus on Christmas’ commercialism and the reason why this holiday is celebrated the way it is today.
Howard Nemerov writes about the material part of the Christmas holiday with an intention to show the reader that people sometimes forget about the spiritual part of the holiday overwhelmed with the quantity and quality of the gifts, the food, and decorations. Describing Santa Claus, Nemerov also notes his artificial appearance that ought to surprise, but instead creates the sense of hollowness:
“ His prescribed costume,
White flannel beard, red belly of cotton waste,
Conceals the thinness of essential hunger,
An appetite that feeds on satisfaction;
Or, pregnant with possessions, he brings forth
Vanity and the void.” (Nemerov 238).
Another subject that Howard Nemerov discusses in his poem, is the desire to want more beautifully wrapped and bright, but useless gifts that Santa Claus inculcates in children:
“Down chimneys into dreams, with this world's goods,
Bringing all the benevolence of money,
He teaches the innocent to want, thus keeps
Our fat world rolling.” (238).
The last line indicates that the desire to consume more goods characterizes the modern society. Such holidays as Christmas became the happy day for supermarkets and multiple manufacturing companies that produce expensive toys, decorations, and other things that can bring some use to the consumers only once a year (Schmidt 41). The amount of tinsel that must decorate every house on the Christmas evening traditionally brings the ultimate benefit to the commercial companies that receive their biggest income for a couple of short days of celebration:
“Played at the better stores by bums, for money,
This annual savior of the economy
Speakes in the parables of the dollar sign:
Suffer the little children to come to Him.” (Nemerov 238).
Nemerov calls Santa Claus “the annual savior of the economy” for the obligation this character puts on parents to buy the best presents to their children. It is clear that every parent wants to make his/her kid happy and buying presents seems to be the easiest way to do that. However, the reality is that the prices for good and quality toys and gadgets that children enjoy rise every year. Not every family can afford giving such expensive presents, and some children suffer because of the inability to please their greed.
However, the idea of a Christmas holiday still remains very kind and beautiful. The spirit of Christmas can bring happiness without presents at all. In my family, we value the time spent together more than material goods that are impressed to us by manufacturing companies and commercialization of Christmas. I believe that the spirit of Christmas consists mainly in uniting the families rather than in expensive presents and perishable tinsel.
Bibliography
Nemerov, Howard. The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Print.
Schmidt, Leigh E. Consumer Rites: The Buying & Selling of American Holidays. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1995. Print.
