by Simon Wright

Created on: November 22, 2011

There’s no “becoming” about it. Christmas has already become too commercialized and has been that way for a long time. There’s huge pressure on people, particularly parents, to spend huge sums of money on presents for loved ones and on entertaining. For many families, coping with the cost of Christmas requires money to be put on credit cards or an overdraft to be run up that then needs to somehow be paid off in the new year. In the current troubled economic environment, this is a burden that many families could really do without.

Non commercial origins of Christmas:

Christmas has an interesting back story. We have all grown up with the story of the birth of Jesus and the fact that Christmas was allocated as an occasion for Christians to celebrate his birth. It’s also fairly commonly known that the early Christians chose the date of an established pagan celebration as a way of ensuring that their new special occasion would be enthusiastically observed. People were used to marking the Winter Soltice, through celebrations such as Yule or the feast of the Son of Isis, so they just had to make the simple adaptation of celebrating at the usual time but for a different cause.

Many of the things that we intrinsically associate with Christmas were borrowed from those pagan festivals, such as the practices of decorating trees, having Yule logs, and kissing under the mistletoe. Over time, the Church’s appropriation of the 25th of December as a date to mark the birth of Jesus of Nazareth paid off and this winter celebration embraced religious facets, such as the singing of carols.

However, whether you look to the pagan or the Christian origins, it’s clear that they have one thing in common – they were not as overtly commercial as our modern Christmas has become. Undoubtedly, there will always have been vendors who will have profited from the fact that the populace wished to observe a celebration but the thought that Christmas promotions would begin as early as October would have astounded them!

Santa Claus and the commercial exploitation of Christmas:

I don’t have a problem with Santa Claus. I’m sure he’s a very nice fellow, who treats his reindeers and his Elven helpers extremely well, and loves kids. However, there’s no doubt that the practice that emerged of giving ever more presents at Christmas has contributed to making Christmas overly costly. Companies are understandably eager to exploit the

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