By Peter Williamson
Opinion Section Editor
Many people, including me, like Christmas. For most here in Europe, it means a short holiday, spending time with your family and friends, and enjoying the atmosphere of it all. The world almost seems at rest when you are sitting at a dinner with your loved ones or sharing gifts with them. Almost, because while you and your friends are sharing moments of quiet happiness, the world is bustling. There are those working day and night in sweatshops to manufacture the new gadgets and commodities that are now in higher demand than at any other time of the year. Men, women, children, they are all working their fingers raw on an extra shift at the factory, making smartphones so that, to put in Louis CK’s words: “you can leave a mean comment on YouTube while you’re taking a shit.”
It doesn’t end there though; people everywhere are working around the clock, globally, managing supply chains, shipping packages, extracting the things that we need to fuel our Christmas shopping mania. Now, you might think: Here’s another stupid rant against consumerism and Christmas. You might even skip this page of the paper entirely. That’s your choice – but by all estimations, we probably won’t have much choice anymore in the future concerning our consumption habits. The immense global network of rare-mineral mines, the oil wells, and with them, the dark and crummy sweatshops where people assemble our “clean and amazingly designed” devices are not infinite.
It would seem that we have a strong need to keep on pushing until we can push no more, that is, pillage the earth until every precious resource that is there has been used up in order to make – what? A couple million brand-new plastic toy cars every year that breaks after a month? That edgy laptop which ends up in a burning pile somewhere next to an Indian slum after a couple of years? Christmas is merely one of the most concentrated events of the over-consumption and associated exploitation of man and nature that happens every day, every year. Every year, we manufacture new, cheesy Christmas decoration; kilometers of cheap LED-lights are manufactured and trees are grown just so that we can cut them down and stare at them for a week or two, after which they get thrown out like trash.
Here in the West, most of our material needs are over-saturated. What do we give each other for Christmas that the other really needs? Think about it. Amongst all the stainless-steel-knife sets and iPhone-covers – when was the last time you got something you really needed? The fact is, nobody actually gives each other anything meaningful for Christmas. Rarely do we receive something meaningful, or – god forbid – handmade or handwritten.
So here are some ideas: first of all, stop buying new things for Christmas and stop asking for them (unless you decide after lengthy consideration that it is something vital). Instead, buy second hand gifts – things such as clothes and gadgets, but one of the best being books. You can get dozens of good, classic books secondhand and their content will probably give more to your friends and family than some new commodity which is essentially devoid of any real use or meaning.
Happy Holidays!
Peter Williamson, Class of 2015, is a Sociology and Politics major from Hamburg, Germany.
