Many complain about difficulty in finding that sometimes-elusive “Christmas Spirit”. And while that may be an expansive topic with lots of puzzling and even controversial tentacles, my aim in this brief article is to point out one possible cause of this that you might not have considered. It’s the onslaught of euphoric Christmas marketing.
Let me explain.
In my pre-teen and teen years especially, I was not the happiest of souls, and Christmas was often the worst time of my emotional year. Human psychology can be a pretty complicated thing, often comprised by a bunch of fairly simple issues overlapping each other in a veritable “bird’s nest” of a knot—metaphorically speaking, of course. And while I can’t say to this day, late in my 50s, that I’ve got all my adolescent Christmas blues figured out, I’m pretty sure I got a big chunk of it solved when I realized that all the Christmas commercials always showed everyone smiling and laughing, and that this simply served to make me feel even worse about my already-fairly-unhappy self. It created an unrealistic expectation that I couldn’t live up to. So, despite whatever level of malaise or blues of dysthymia I had, it was worsened by the assumption that I was supposed to be as happy as all the people in the commercials seemed.
I didn’t realize that all they were doing was trying to talk everybody into chasing happiness by buying that wine, or those candies—or by buying the bracelet or the new car as a gift for a loved one. To me, it seemed as if they were telling me what all humans were supposed to be like—which caused me consternation because I was not like that myself, and could not figure out how to be. And did they provide a disclaimer that:
“BE ADVISED that not all purchasers of this product achieve the levels of joy depicted in this advertisement.”
Nope. I’d have to figure that out on my own. And in a decade or two, I did!
But before I figured all this out, I would just brace myself at Christmas, for that “Grinch”, as I called it, who seemed to steal from me what I supposed was the rightful entitlement of all people: a deeply meaningful and emotionally fulfilling holiday.
And I suppose now that many likely suffer from similar disappointment and confusion at Christmas. Perhaps psychologists have figured this out, too, and have got a name for it! But it sure did cause me a lot of pain and suffering—getting trampled by the marketing rush, and not realizing it for what it was.
And I don’t suppose that many of the marketers realize what they’re doing—what harm they’re causing—though some of them certainly do. That field is certainly dependent, at the higher levels, at least, on cognitive scientists, who tell them how best to play on human emotions so as to prompt the purchase. It’s all about profits. Never mind that their products aren’t always great, or that their sales tactics can cause harm.
So while some marketers may well have a heart, we should be always aware that many of them don’t, and they’re willing to make us feel lousy if they think it increases their chances of getting the sale. Better to go to a real Christmas party and see for yourself how many people there are not overcome by rapturous joy, than to take the word of the TV commercial for how it is! At the real party, you’ll likely find people more like yourself than like the people on TV. And maybe you can enjoy some genuine moments with real humans who, like you, aren’t perfect, either!
And having said all this, though, I should say that at 57 years old, I’m now much more comfortable in my own skin than I was in my adolescent years. I don’t get the Christmas blues anymore. And I have some more thoughts about this “Christmas Spirit” that we end up chasing sometimes. I think we can sometimes get ourselves into similar problems with unrealistic expectations with regard to that, too. Perhaps I’ll post about it soon! (If I do, I’ll put a link to it right here.)
