Ah yes, it is time for the sights and sounds of the season. What are those sights and sounds you ask? The visions of family togetherness? Sharing a meal with people important to you? Celebrating the birth of a savior? Or….
HURRY AND BUY ALL THIS CHEAP STUFF FOR SALE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE BECAUSE AFFECTION IS CLEARLY MEASURED WITH DOLLAR SIGNS!
I am old enough to remember when Christmas marketing showed some manner of restraint until Thanksgiving. Now, Thanksgiving has been subsumed into the spectacle and Halloween is quickly being enveloped. It’s only a matter of time until Memorial Day falls to the onslaught.
My complicated feelings about Christmas have been widely disseminated in this space (here, here, and here, among others). There are several roots for those feelings, but right at the top of the list is this crass consumerist spectacle and its effect on people and society. It cheapens the importance of our holidays, both spiritually and as quality time with loved ones. It cheapens our human relationships. It sucks money out of our communities and our pocketbooks and gathers it unto giant corporations who couldn’t care less if our communities live or die.
Fear not, I’m not about to go full agrarian and launch into a discussion of the inherently destructive nature of consumerism. At least not today. I do not have the space or the time for all the words on that topic currently rattling around inside my brain. Today, I am thinking about how to best manage the current system. How do we manage to properly serve ourselves, our sanity, our neighbors, and our communities?
During the holidays, we hear “shop small” and “shop local” as marketing phrases. Rightly or wrongly, these phrases tend to be included in a vast sea of marketing phrases and buzzwords, as if each is a value-neutral option for your purchase. Do you want a red car or a blue car? Do you want a brown couch or a tan couch? Do you want to shop local or shop online?
Unlike those other examples, how and where you shop is not a value-neutral proposition. It is quite the opposite. It is an actual statement of your values and priorities in life. If you shop with small and/or local businesses, you value those businesses. There is some Old Testament wisdom that a person’s priorities are shown by where they spend their time, talent, and treasure. Modern-day shopping is an extension of that. We might profess to have certain priorities or values, but our spending reveals our actual priorities and values.
This can be a difficult proposition. Buying local might be more expensive or require us to wait a little longer for delivery. With a tight budget or a limited deadline, that can be challenging. But so too are empty storefronts, struggling businesses, declining tax revenues that impact daily government services, and neighbors moving away because they have no financial choice.
Our economic overlords have spent many decades pushing our spending away from the small and local. They have made it ever cheaper and more convenient to shop large, shop online, and shop with everyone but your neighbor. We cannot change that overnight, but we can make a tangible impact this holiday season.
We have a month and a half until Christmas. I trust that each of you still has some shopping to do, either for gifts or holiday meals and gatherings. I challenge you.to find at least one opportunity where you would be inclined to purchase items away from your local community and choose to buy it locally instead. With only a little bit of effort, you can transfer some spending to a local small business, local craftsman, or a chain retailer with a local presence. It will matter more than you think, individually and in the collective impact of each person who takes this step.
When you look at your list of local taxpayers, employers, or donors to community organizations, it is a wide and varied list, but you won’t see Amazon and Jeff Bezos listed anywhere. Don’t forget that.
For further reading: I highly recommend the work on
on the topic of buying well as a form of giving.James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.
The town (pop about 2000) where we live makes this difficult; there are very few local shops of any kind and the ones that are here tend to be hostile in various ways (e.g., you have to know the owner, basically, to figure out when it's ever open). But we have added pressure this year in that our local post office is even worse, so we can't shop online unless we know for sure the package would be shipped with UPS or FedEx, and that's hard to tell sometimes. When you have that kind of pressure on you, it's amazing what you can start to find around you that will serve very well as gifts -- maybe not your first choice of gift, but a gift nonetheless -- or how it pushes you to finally figure out when that shop is open or what have you. Sometimes, you need to have your hand forced.
✌🙏