What Can a Satire from the 1950s Tell Us About Holiday Commercialism?

Two holiday seasons ago, I wrote about the 1996 film “Jingle All the Way,” a corny Schwarzenegger comedy that pokes fun at the holiday shopping rush and the mayhem that often ensues. I noted that nearly every over-the-top depiction of craziness in the film – including shoppers pepper spraying each other and brawling in the aisles – has since actually occurred.

This year, I’d like to remember a much older and more obscure, yet perhaps more substantive critique of holiday commercialism. It’s an incredibly prescient 1956 short story by the late science fiction writer Frederik Pohl titled “Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus.”

This story is all-but-forgotten, perhaps because science fiction was not considered true literature in those years, or because it simply came too early: with memory of the Depression still looming in people’s minds, few were ready to criticize consumerism. But the story is prophetic to the point of nearly being a description of today’s commercialism, and it deserves a wide reading.

In a humorous segment that sets the story’s tone, the main character, George, recites this brilliant re-imagining of “The Night Before Christmas” in an attempt to impress the family of a young woman he’s trying to court (I’ve copied only part of it):

So much for the bedroom, so much for the bath,
So much for the kitchen, too little by half!
Come Westinghouse, Philco! Come Hotpoint, G.E.!
Come Sunbeam! Come Mixmaster! Come to the Tree!

And out of the shops, how they spring with a clatter,
The gifts and appliances words cannot flatter!
The robot dishwasher, the new Frigidaire,
The doll with the didy and curlable hair!
The electrified hairbrush, the black lingerie,
The full-color stereoscopic TV!
Come, Credit Department! Come, Personal Loan!
Come, Mortgage, come Christmas Club –”

The poem ends when the woman’s family has had enough.

In the world of Pohl’s story, every holiday carol has been rewritten like this to promote the twin virtues of spending and consumption: one carol is called “All I Want For Christmas is Two of Everything.”[1] The shopping season begins in summer; by September, it is already far along. Christmas trees are decorated with festive credit card applications. Holiday cards are discarded and incinerated only a couple of days after being received, and come Christmas night, cleanup crews rush to take down the trees, decorations, and every sign of the holiday. 

The religious origin of Christmas, and the fact that Christmas Day actually marks the start of a twelve day season is routinely overlooked. George, unaware of this rich, forgotten tradition, remarks in passing that “Christmas is more than a mere selling season of the year to me; it means something.” The world of the story is a mix of jolly and chilling; one part A Christmas Carol and one part Nineteen Eighty-Four.

While we are not yet this far along, the story is almost entirely on-point in its basic observations about what the logical end of consumerism would look like. Since gifts are bought in anticipation of Christmas Day, the stores really do completely drop the holiday atmosphere, merchandise, and music immediately after, with no regard for twelve-day season. 

And there’s no question the length and intensity of the shopping season has been steadily increasing over the years, making the suddenness with which it ends rather anti-climactic. Last year, I spotted a crate of Easter chocolates in my local supermarket on December 26^th.

While carols have not actually been rewritten as in Pohl’s story, any holiday television watcher knows that the most fitting use for the Carol of the Bells is to sell last year’s Cadillacs. Who hasn’t heard an insipid or even offensive parody of The Twelve Days of Christmas? And we should not forget that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was created by a department store to promote the holiday shopping season. (This actually happened in 1939; perhaps it inspired Pohl).

America’s pleasant, festive vision of the holiday season, drawn largely from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol,  has become increasingly commercialized and is now augmented by blow-by-blow reports of Black Friday violence, projected sales numbers, and UPS or FedEx delivery gaffes (two years ago, a flat-screen TV was launched over a fence; last year a tablet was left in a trash can). In recent years, there have been complaints and fines over late shipping. Last year many families blamed the late delivery of Honey Baked Hams for “ruining” their holiday dinners. 

In Pohl’s story, the department stores keep meticulous sales figures and work to exhaustion 7 days a week, fearful of failing to set a new sales record. In an era decades before online shopping and 2-day delivery, Pohl has George boast, “In the four years that I’ve headed the department we’ve yet to fail to get an order delivered when it was promised.”

One final arresting passage has less to do with consumerism, but is worth noting. At the height of the selling season, George is called for jury duty, and, like many of us, wonders whether he can get out of it. Another employee explains that it won’t be possible: “It’s a big case—blindfold sampling of twelve brands of filter cigarettes—and…it wouldn’t look right to try to evade it.”

This brief exchange predicts the present corruption of our civic institutions: for example, the merging of political and economic power, principally in the corporate funding of political campaigns, and corporate capture of the regulatory process. The general conflation of democracy with consumerism and the notion that shopping is “voting with one’s dollars” contributes further to this. A few years ago the gum company Mentos appropriated the language of democracy for a gum called “Up 2 U”: the pack reads, “2 flavors, 1 pack, you decide.”

There’s no point in further describing the current state of the holidays – we can all see it for ourselves. But reading a decades-old satire that at times is now almost blandly descriptive is something else entirely. It’s illuminating and it may make you stop and think, even if you’re already against the celebration of consumerism that the holidays have become. 

And so instead of shopping for discounted luxury bath items or neon-green Christmas cookies, consider looking for a copy of “Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus” – if anybody is selling that.[2]