Holidays draining our very last dollar

The holidays signal the beginning of merriment, sharing, and long-ass shopping lines.

Rob Hardy

Silhouette Staff

Another Christmas season started to make its presence known this past week, and once again we are poised for the same in-your-face bombardment we get every year. If anything about Christmas has changed over the past couple of decades, it’s simply that the holiday season gets bigger every year.

It’s one last kick at the can to consume and buy a disgusting amount of products that will lose their glimmer almost as fast as the credit card bill comes due – or, maybe until Apple comes out with the next iPhone. Call me out of the loop, but I fail to recognize the need to be able to access the internet from four different personal devices.

It’s a huge shift to evolve from the selfish children we once were to one day being completely un-materialistic, but some of us never quite get there. These days it seems adults are nearly as excited to unwrap their video game systems as the kids are – at least those who still have a job and a roof over their heads. For these people, lining up for an entire night to await the opening of a Black Friday sale so they can begin to load up several shopping carts is a way of life. Please recall, three years ago, when a frenzied mob of shoppers literally broke down a door and trampled a store associate to death at a Walmart on Long Island, NY.

Even with the abysmal economic situation, especially in the United States, the concept of a lean Christmas may still be a few years away from popularity. But it is already the reality for many of the 45 million people south of the border who are on food stamps. And while many in Canada are still relatively safe from similar fates for now, the storm clouds are gathering.

Last week, a panel on CBC Newsworld discussed the state of the job market and was quite clear in declaring that the Canadian economy is either entering another recession, or has truly never left the one that began in 2008. Why then is it business as usual when it comes to yet another Christmas season telling us to buy, buy, buy? And why are people still marching along with this circus that has become completely out of step with what is going on in the real world?

I think it’s time we scrap all these celebrations and out-dated Santa Claus parades. We know very well that a growing number of people throughout the GTA are in far too much pain to be able to celebrate anything. People who have lost their jobs, their homes, their families and even the will to live are often in no mood to take part in a fleeting seasonal indulgence, one that might depress them all the more. This, coupled with a community of people becoming all the more unable to truly care and relate to their fellow neighbours without the now-familiar screen of social media, is a recipe for a huge disconnect.

I’m probably in the minority, but wouldn’t this money be truly better spent funding the dwindling resources of the food banks, or injecting much needed resources into public housing? Having city councils adopt some austerity measures as a social experiment to see their effects prior to them being forced upon us, as in Europe, would be an unexpected but welcome change for the better.

If you think about it, who really wants to live in a city where we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on boulevard flowerbeds when we have one of the worst poverty rates in the country?

It’s time for some priorities. We need to re-evaluate and begin forgoing some of the things we have become accustomed to, or worse, feel entitled to. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, physiological requirements like nourishing food and decent shelter are the most basic and absolutely essential.

In other words, you wouldn’t go on a shopping spree to buy luxurious extras if you haven’t eaten and may get evicted from your shabby apartment. The same applies to the public purse. Why are we funding parties for part of the population when others are living a desperate lifestyle?

As humans, we have a drive to take care of ourselves first, but at some point we have to realize that financial segregation can turn into a disaster, as it also drives away investors when large portions of a city’s population, and eventually infrastructure, have fallen on hard times. One need look no further than Hamilton, because as I hear people crowing about how great this city is I have to wonder, aside from a few nicer areas, if they need a pair of glasses.