excess

i used to love christmas. i thought it was a beautiful holiday. i have a pretty large family, especially on my dad's side. he had, at one point, 8 or 9 siblings, and they're spread apart enough that my dad's niece is older than he is (my dad is the youngest in the family). point: i have a LOT of cousins and second cousins and third cousins and maybe even fourth cousins now (do you even count past second cousins...?), so christmas used to be a HUGE deal because it was rare that we could find a time where every single one of us could get together.

back to my point--i used to love christmas. families come together, people let you in front of them when the traffic is bad, presents, people who have little to no money find some way to get you something from the heart even if it only cost them a buck, snow days. i just thought it was a beautiful time of the year.

and then i started working in the mall. and this year, i spent the entire time between thanksgiving and christmas despising the very thought of christmas. people were just plain rude, people were trampled on the way into wal-mart on black friday, there is such a thing as "black friday."

i didn't know about the evil of black friday until i started working in the mall. i knew some people went shopping on the day after thanksgiving, but i thought it was just the "early bird specials" and let's face it, i'm not a morning person, so i assumed people went shopping super early and were back at home with their families before lunch. i was terribly, terribly mistaken. black friday and every day after that is a terrible time for a mall employee when it takes 15 minutes of driving around the parking lot searching for a spot, only to be cut off by someone who saw it 10 seconds after you, and as they steal your parking spot, they wave at you as if you had waved them into the spot. black friday is the day where the drive into evansville--which should be 20 minutes--takes almost an hour.

this all begs the question, why are we driven by the idea of having stuff? i got a new phone for christmas--a shiny, new blackberry storm. i thought it was the coolest thing ever. and as i started using it more and more, i realized that i really don't want to become a part of that. i had the internet at my constant desposal and my emails were forwarded directly to my phone, and it could probably make me breakfast if i asked it to. and as i kept playing with it, it hit me: why do i have this? the internet and email service cost $30 every month to keep it going, and do i really need that? in a week i'll be back in bloomington where there's a wi-fi hotspot every ten feet (or at least someone who doesn't know how to secure their wireless home network) and my laptop is almost always in my backpack. so what's the point? here i am walking around with this flashy new phone and there are people who can't even afford to eat every day.

and i'm not saying that having a cell phone is the root of all evil, but just think about all the things we have... do we really need those things? do i need a cell phone? i would say yes since i'm going to school 2 1/2 hours away and i don't have a land line up there, and i'm sure my mother would like to know that i'm still alive from time to time. do i need the most badass phone on the planet? not hardly. if it can send a text message and make phone calls, that's all i really "need" as a college student.

christmas used to be "the most wonderful time of the year," but i'm not so sure it is anymore. we've turned it into something less than that. and you don't have to celebrate the birth of jesus to be into this idea that the world can be a better place. (besides, jesus really wasn't born on december 25th anyway.) and maybe if we'd just stop focusing on the "stuff" and all the bad things in the world, we could really turn it back into this magical time where the world just isn't quite as evil.

i guess ignorance is bliss after all, even if only for a few weeks.