Unit 9

Text A

In the U.SA., Christmas has long been characterized by piles of presents and lavish parties. Not long ago, a group of people urged the public to give up extravagant Christmas celebrations and spend the holiday simply.

In Defense of a Simple Christmas

Bill McKibben

I know what I will be doing on Christmas Eve. My wife, my 4-year-old daughter, my dad, my brother and I will snowshoe out into the woods in the late afternoon, choose a suitable tree and saw it down. I have had my eye on three or four likely candidates all year.

We will bring it home, shake off the snow, decorate it and then head for church, where the Sunday school class I help teach will perform this year's pageant. And then it is home to hang stockings, stoke the fire and go to bed. Our Christmas celebration is as traditional as it gets, except that there is no sprawling pile of presents under the tree.
Several years ago, a few of us in northern New York started a campaign for "$100 holidays." We decided to urge people not to spend more than $100 per family on presents and to rely instead on simple homemade gifts. That first year, I made walking sticks for everyone. Last year, I made spicy chicken sausage. My mother has embraced the idea by making calendars illustrated with snapshots she has taken. 

The $100 figure was a way to explain to children why they weren't getting everything on their list. So far, our daughter, Sophie, does fine at Christmas. Her stocking is exciting to her. The tree is exciting. Skating on the pond is exciting. It is worth mentioning, however, that we don't have a television, so she may not understand the degree of her impoverishment.

This holiday idea may sound modest. It is modest. And yet at the same time, it is pretty radical. Christmas, it turns out, is a bulwark of the nation's economy. Many businesses do a third of their volume in the months just before Dec. 25. And so it hits a nerve to question whether we should celebrate the birth of a man who said we should give all that we have to the poor by showering one another with motorized tie racks.

When we began the $100 campaign, merchants writing to the local newspapers made it clear to us what a threatening idea it was. Newspaper columnists thought it was pretty extreme, too. One said that while our message had merit, it would do too much damage to business.

And he was right, or at least not wrong. If we all backed out of Christmas excess, we would sink many a gift shop. If we threw less lavish office parties, caterers would suffer — and florists and liquor wholesalers and so on down the feeding chain. But we have to start somewhere if we are to climb down from the unsustainable heights we have reached, and Christmas might as well be it.

When we began to spread our idea about celebrating Christmas in a new way, we were earnest and sober. Big-time Christmas was an environmental disgrace — all that wrapping paper and all those batteries. The money could be so much better spent: The price of one silk necktie could feed a village for a day. And struggling to create a proper Christmas drives poor families into debt. Here in New York, January finds many people cutting back on heat to pay off their Christmas bills.

Those were all good reasons to scale back. But as we continued our campaign, we found we really weren't interested in changing Christmas because we wanted fewer batteries. We wanted more joy. We felt cheated by the Christmases we were having — so rushed, so busy and so full of hype that we couldn't relax and enjoy the season.

You may be too late for this Christmas. You already may have bought your pile of stuff. In fact, turning the focus of Christmas back to Christ is a long and patient effort. But to judge from our family's holidays in recent years, it is well worth the effort. (644 words)