The Karmic Weight of Christmas

Do you feel it? It’s the weight of Christmas bearing down on your psyche. In my case, the weight of guilt over just who made these items, what their lives are like, why I’m buying them, or in most cases, not buying them. I can’t afford to shop at the ever-so-landed-gentry Downtown Mall, and I’m not sure that shopping there eliminates the possibility of exploiting an invisible sweat shop worker. It also raises my blood pressure to walk into stores where I know they know I can’t afford to be there. You can always tell by the shoes, by the way.

So, I try to minimize rather than eliminate the kind of shopping that I’m doing. We already own Christmas ornaments, some gifts, some bought years ago, but they no doubt had a dubious beginning. It’s hard to weigh the carbon footprint of a one-time-use live tree against the human cost of a re-usable artificial tree. Tossup, really, or maybe not. Somewhere, someone is doing the algorithms for all this. I’m just not sure how you calculate variables like the value of a human life, extent of human pain, the lack of empathy on the part of the US consumer, the joy of Christmas morning, etc. I’d like to think that God is a grand mathematician who knows the value of all of these things, but the units are not monetary. Perhaps there is some transcendent unit of measurement that escapes our grasp, kind of like the value of infinity. But, like math, it all balances somehow. It’s all perfect, if awful, all at the same time. I imagine that God, like the nun in my 2nd grade class, would like to bang our heads on the blackboard to try to get us to understand what’s being calculated. I like to think God has a temper

This weighs on me as I order Blake’s Christmas gifts online, avoid the diseased, frenzied craziness of the Fashion Square mall, and try to keep away from buying extras that none of us really needs. I’ve done pretty well in that regard, but, I know that the trampoline I ordered, that he’s been asking for since he was 3, is most probably made in China. The company is in the UK, but for all the searching I’ve done, I can’t find if they get the trampolines from China, or make them in the UK.

What do those of us do who cannot afford to buy made in the developed world finery, who are grossed out when we walk into WalMart (which I still admit, I do, because there are some things I can get only there, like the trampoline, which was the cheapest there), who feel a little less bad about walking into the far hipper Target, and who in general feel the weight of what it is to consume amidst the deprivation of so many others? Is there a way to balance the equation of pain we are all a part of?

I’ve ventured a bit into the Craig’s list/Freecycle world, and that’s helped somewhat. I got a free jacket for Blake, a free artificial tree. I gave away the baby stuff to folks who needed it. I’m trying to become more conscious of the ramifications of my choices, which is not easy. But this seems only once removed from the pain that gave rise to these items. Like my sister’s hand-me-down beaver skin coat: I wasn’t the original owner, so the pain of the animals that made it was kind of cancelled out. Darn, I loved that coat until so much duct tape was holding it together that I just had to let it go.

I was going to begin this blog with an ironic juxtaposition of a Wal-Mart Christmas ad linking to this video, followed by a “Every Kiss Begins with Kaye” ad, linking to this news story. But, it’s all so obvious, like shooting fish in a barrel. We are all tainted to fewer or greater degrees by the entire global economy, and finger pointing just makes me feel nasty.

But, being human, I take silly pride in my lack of a diamond solitaire (I was so happy when my husband didn’t buy me one for our engagement, and, I’ve never sported one in the past), but that hollow pride is somehow mitigated by the fact that I have a house full of stuff that was probably manufactured on the backs of so many folks struggling to keep going, including the retail workers right here in the good ‘ol USA. I worked at Saks Fifth Avenue for Christmas in 1987, and I made minimum wage. So you can’t escape that exploitation, even in the high-end stores, even though they ask you in stores like that to dress like you don’t need the job.

Is the answer to give to charity, to live like a monk, to work tirelessly to balance the equation, or to wipe the abacus clean, so to speak, and begin with a whole new way of calculating what goes to Caesar and what goes to God in the grand balance sheet of life. I wager I’m giving a bit of my soul to Caesar, and that’s just not the coin of that realm, except as leverage to release my more readily recognized currency.

I think that’s called marketing, the voice outside our head that increasingly substitutes for a conscience, becomes the way we measure the value of our actions. We are a sad bunch, for sure, a country so wealthy that we are losing ourselves to our own success. There are no simple, self-help answers to this. This is the kind of thing that can only be approached through silence, meditation, soul-searching, prayer, and gaining the inner strength from these actions to walk the talk of human justice. If I’m honest with myself, I’ll admit that I’m not there yet. Not by a long shot.