The Meaning of Boxing Day

Yesterday was Boxing Day. Virtually no Americans know the meaning or origin of that holiday, but it is so strongly associated with returning Christmas gifts that many people actually assume that it refers to placing merchandise back into boxes and taking them back to the stores. Worse still, retailers seem to be playing on that association so actively that in coming years I won’t be surprised if Boxing Day is actually recognized throughout the United States as the gift return holiday.

To my knowledge, Kohls was the worst offender, having scheduled a 5 AM opening for December 26^th. Other big box stores weren’t far off with their early openings and special promotions. There is a nascent trend towards turning the day after Christmas into a new Black Friday. All of the commentary I’ve already written here about how consumerism detracts from the enjoyment of non-shopping traditions applies tenfold to Christmas over how it applied to Thanksgiving.

My heart goes out to anyone who typically celebrates Christmas but has to work on that day. So it made me sad to see that each of the Wilson Farms stores and Tim Horton’s in my area were open throughout the holiday, and were awfully well-populated. It’s an unsympathetic employer who makes his employees work on what is supposed to be a cultural holiday on which most Americans gather together, relax, and celebrate the closing year. Even if they come from a distinct culture, I think at least that one day of rest ought to be a near-universal perk of working in America.

Added to the number of people who had to actually push coins across a retail counter on Christmas Day, I’m certain that early-morning promotions as major stores meant that overnight crews were required to setup that night, which presumably shortened of otherwise impeded some people’s gatherings with their friends and families. As consumers, making a shopping holiday of Boxing Day does a disservice to others who had, or would have, celebrated Christmas the day before.

But my concern is really for everyone, whether the new consumerist push obligated them to sacrifice a bit of Christmas or not. I find it appalling that returning gifts after Christmas is now assumed to be part of the holiday season. Personally, I’ve never unwrapped a package, looked at its contents, and thought to myself, “Gee, I can’t wait to returning this for something of roughly equal value that I actual like!” I’ve never said, “I hope you kept the receipt.” Generally, when I receive a Christmas gift, I say thank you, and I mean it, and if it’s an article of clothing that doesn’t fit, I or the giver exchange it for the same item in the proper size. That’s why the things that we open on Christmas morning are gifts: We didn’t choose them for ourselves; we don’t cherry-pick them; they represent not just our own base desires, but a material expression of how our loved-ones perceive us.

And even if our self-perception and the perception of others don’t align, accepting a gift is a great way to discover new things, and to learn to enjoy what you might not have chosen for yourself. This year, my mother gave me a very generous gift and before I opened it she commented that I might not think I need it. And indeed I don’t. I’m still young enough and fortuitous enough to stand the cold of my apartment without need of an electric heater. My mother intimated that I could take it back if I tried it and found that it didn’t suit me, but I made it clear to her that I would not be doing that, and I acknowledged that it was something I never would have purchased for myself, but that I would use now that I owned it. And despite not being something I’d coveted, it does suit me on some level, as the fake-fire display adds to the aesthetic of my home, and after all, I do need heat, even if I don’t acknowledge it to myself.

The price of the item might have done me better directed elsewhere, or even just kept by my mother, who is financially little better off than I am. But what ever happened to the old cliché, “It’s the thought that counts”? Perhaps we retain that sentiment as an ethic for the giver, but we don’t seem to ever apply it to the receiver. The thought behind each gift has value beyond money, and returning the item is often as good as returning the thought, sending the message, “You thought wrong.”

This is one of those instances in which the etiquette that we learned as children is thrown out the window as we age. Aren’t kids expected to say thank you even to the gifts that they don’t like? Then don’t their parents explain that they need only wear the ugly sweater when the aunt who gave it comes around next year? Are things like that social obligations that we just grow out of over time? Or do we just conveniently forget them after years of building up our material desires?

The four, six, eight and more weeks before Christmas are devoted to mutually gratifying those desires. With Boxing Day now devoted to consumption as well, how many more days need to be added to this shopping spree before the American affection for consumerism reaches a breaking point and starts to cede ground back to the spirit of giving, gratitude, and togetherness?

Borders Bookstores: Murdered!

I expect to actually mourn the loss of Borders. For me, it’s like losing a long-time neighbor with whom you had always exchanged pleasant greetings, and whom you assumed you would have ample opportunity to get to know better. It’s also kind of like practically everyone else in my neighborhood inattentively pitched burning trash into his yard until he died of smoke inhalation. That assessment might suggest to you that I’m in the anger phase.

I don’t think I’m going to go through all the stages of the Kubler-Ross model. I’m at a stage of my life wherein I can’t imagine myself entertaining all five of those responses to any personal loss of tragedy, whether it’s the death of a loved one or the closure of a media store in which I wish I’d had the chance to spend more time. There are only two alternatives for me right now, and I kind of like it that way. That which I cannot accept makes me angry, and I’ll remain angry as long as my spirit will allow. I have too strong an ideological commitment to the notion of remaining vigilantly aware of what I consider to be wrong to ever allow myself the indulgence of denial. I’m too proud and solitary to see the appeal of bargaining. And depression… well sure, most things can depress me, but that and anger are almost never mutually exclusive.

I’m going to stay angry about this until people seem to widely understand what we’re losing, and how culpable they are for it. Every literate person with an e-book reader is complicit in the murder both of small bookstores and the big-box retailers like the dearly departed Borders. I am and will remain angry at everyone whose obsession with the latest gadgets and status symbols overrides their perception of benefit in having community spaces where people who appreciate the same things can appreciate them in kind, and where people can actively discover new ideas.

I’m terrified that someday there won’t be anywhere left for me to go to leaf through the pages of a book with an interesting title, attractive cover, and appropriate thickness, or to run my finger over a chosen shelf to find a topic at random. Why does no one else seem angry about this? Why is there no public sense that gaining in convenience can bring about the loss of something else that’s equally or more desirable?

I’m losing a neighbor that I really wanted to know better, for love of the few splendid memories we have. He’s been killed now by so many misguided hands, and wounded in so many places. Most everywhere I’ve travelled there’s been a Borders bookstore, and now it will be torn from the entire landscape of the country, wounded in every place by people who wield their e-book readers like knives concealed in cowardice beneath the robes they wear for a ceremony of shallow literacy.

I cannot accept plots to murder the printed word in sacred space, so I mourn in anger against these conspirators.

A Sense of Place

There was a nice slideshow on Salon yesterday, naming some of the most beautiful and distinctive bookstores in the world, which, the author said, would “make you rethink your Kindle.”

I don’t think the average Kindle owner thought about it in the first place. I get the impression that the e-book reader phenomenon is driven primarily by an unmitigated and all but universal fervor for technology. If it’s identified as new and innovative, it seems as though people will stand in line to get one, even if they never considered whether they wanted it or needed it.

But the higher tech option is not always the best option, and I wish I could push American society to the breaking point of realizing that fact once and for all. Sometimes the traditional alternative provides an appeal that is different from the appeal of modernity, but one that is still distinct and meaningful. The Salon piece suggests one such appeal that should be obvious, but that I think is often overlooked even by the defenders of analog: the beauty of actually buying something from a physical space.

I’m not at all a shopper, but when I do wish to acquire something, nothing pleases me more than holding it in my hands before it is really mine to possess. I love to flip through copious stacks of records and find the ones that most appeal to me, and I love to leaf through physically real books, to be able to pick things up at random and hold them side-by-side.

If there’s one thing that technology cannot satisfyingly replace, I would say that thing may be the thrill of discovery. I honestly can't understand why this doesn’t occur to other people. Convenience is not always an improvement. There is a point at which convenience steals away the features that made an activity what it was. And in the case of books, tactile sensation and dog-earing pages and marginalia all aside, part of the experience of literature – indeed, of virtually anything – is its physicality, the sense that there is a place where the literate gather, a shared visual representation of the enormity of what the intellectually curious are vainly striving to grasp.

Sometimes, as the Salon slideshow points out to us, that physical space may be a repurposed cathedral or theater, a site standing as a lovely monument in some distant place, or hidden somewhere inside the daily experiences of our landscape. Sometimes, bookstores are really beautiful. And to my mind, losing bookstores, or record stores, or any of the other places that lend a sense of community, sacrifice, and engagement to our acts of acquisition is bad enough if those places are banal. It is worse when the experience that’s lost is not only meaningful and affective, but powerfully unique.