Mike Parker: Has the Spirit of Christmas Past died?
Retail sales during 2021’s November-December holiday season grew 14.1 percent over 2020 to $886.7 billion, easily beating the National Retail Federation’s forecast and setting a record, despite challenges from inflation, supply chain disruptions, and the ongoing pandemic.
So far, in 2022, retailers are on another record-setting pace. According to the National Retail Federation, the world’s largest retail trade association, that number includes online and other non-store sales, which were up 11.3 percent at $218.9 billion. Those numbers exclude automobile dealers, gasoline stations, and restaurants to focus on core retail sales.
Merry Chri$tma$ 2022 is on the way.
How different Christmas has become. My mother grew up in the mountains of West Virginia. She was born a year before the Black Monday of 1929 began the collapse that spiraled into “The Great Depression.”
Christmas for my mother meant a shoebox containing an orange, an apple, and some hard candy. Children in today’s affluent United States can scarcely imagine their grandparents or great-grandparents living during times when a couple of pieces of fruit and a few pieces of candy served as the chief Christmas treats.
Other highlights of Christmas for my mother and her sisters might be a doll, a set of jacks and a ball, or sometimes a coloring book and crayons. Mom told me that she and her sisters received a metal tea set one year. None of the girls had an exclusive claim on the tea set. Mom’s parents expected their girls to be grateful for what was to them an extravagant gift. Mom and Dad expected the girls to share. They did.
The Christmas tree that stood in my mother’s home was small. Her dad purposely cut a little tree from the evergreens on his farm. Since Mom’s family adorned the tree with handmade decorations and a few tinsel icicles, a small tree required fewer decorations. No lights illuminated their Christmas tree. Her home had no electricity, and candles were a fire hazard.
Mom often experienced a “white Christmas,” but she did not fondly dream of one. Where she grew up, once the snow fell, “we didn’t see the ground until next spring,” she explained.
Mom has strong feelings about the materialism that forms the Spirit of Christmas Present.
“When it’s your birthday, who gets the presents?” she often asks.
She follows that observation with this mantra: “People go into debt to buy things they can’t afford – and then worry how they will pay for it all year. What your children really want is your time and your love.”
Let’s fast-forward about 20 or so years. What was Christmas like for a Lenoir County farm family in the 1950s? According to my wife, Sandra, her father would cut a four-foot pine from the farm he tended and put it on a table in the corner of the living room.
“Mama would mix powdered Fab laundry detergent with water, and I would whip it like cream. After the Fab was ready, I’d take a table knife and spread it on the branches of the tree to look like snow,” she said. She said that her family added lights, glass balls, and lots of tinsel.
Sandra’s family exchanged only small presents. One year she remembers she bought her father a tie. Another year, she found a special gift for her brother Leneave. The present was a radio with pieces that flipped outward to transform it into a toy rifle.
Christmas past holds a special memory for her. “It was the only time of the year that we had apples and oranges,” she said. “Daddy would buy a half bushel of oranges, a dozen or so apples, and a dozen or so tangerines. He also bought some walnuts.”
In her home, family members hung stocking around the doorframe.
“Santa would stuff my stocking with a bottle of pink Desert Flower hand lotion and some chocolate-covered peanuts,” Sandra recalled. On one of Santa’s visits, the jolly elf brought her two matching poodle dog lamps. She still treasures those lamps.
For the Dawson family, the big event was the visit to Aunt Mae’s home. Family members from North Carolina and Virginia gathered at Aunt Mae’s, where they enjoyed what most people consider the traditional Christmas dinner. After dinner, family members exchanged gifts.
Most children today cannot understand how little materialism infected the Spirit of Christmas Past. Sadly, given today’s whirl of buying and wrapping and partying, most adults have a hard time remembering earlier days and simpler times – times when Christmas did not mean gifts piled on top of gifts. Christmas offered, instead, an opportunity to be with family – and to rejoice quietly in God’s blessings.
We are blessed, indeed. Let’s pause to remember.
Mike Parker is a columnist for the Neuse News. You can reach him at mparker16@gmail.com.
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