DECEMBER 22, 2019 – On Thursday our younger and his wife flew to Minnesota to help us celebrate Christmas. In anticipation of their arrival, my wife worked her usual home decoration miracles, inside and out. The centerpiece is a beautifully trimmed Tannenbaum.
I was quite content to defer to her sensibilities and wallow in the warm, cheerful Juletide ambience she had created . . . until . . . all the presents magically appeared, carefully wrapped and labeled. They reminded me of my charter membership in the Christmas Club of Guys, whose motto is, Procrastinate, Panic, and Buy Last Minute. With our planned trip to the cabin leading up to Christmas, I realized it was already “last minute.”
Late Thursday morning, I dashed from my office to the light-rail line a block away and hopped a train to . . . the Mall of America. I naively thought I could do my “Christmas shopping” for a couple of hours before meeting up with my wife for a quick lunch and drive to nearby MSP, where at 1:39 our Christmas guests would arrive from JFK.
Me at the Mall of America is like a beginner skier plunging down the headwall of Tuckerman’s Ravine on the side of Mt. Washington. When you’re a beginner heading down that headwall, you forget everything they taught you in ski school, such as “keep your weight forward”; “keep your weight on your downhill ski”; etc., etc. Facing an almost vertical incline, you instantly become a large-scale mess. Likewise, in shopping at Mauled in America I was soon hurtling downhill with little chance of avoiding injury.
My first stop was a “fun” sock store that projected some promise . . . until I saw that the featured socks were plastered with the F-bomb. Ha-ha, ho-ho! I thought. If anyone on my list were to receive a set of F-bomb socks from me, they’d know with certainty that the earth is soon coming to an end. I quickly moved on . . . to a soap and lotion outfit. That’s where I realized the power of packaging.
To avoid premature disclosure of my choices, I won’t describe the rest of my expedition. Just know that I managed to escape relatively intact from the vortex of America’s monument to consumerism.
But it shook me bad, as I contemplated the worldwide supply and distribution chains behind the consumer merchandise that whole fleets of container ships from Asia bring to our shores. I thought about all the fossil fuels consumed in the manufacture and transport of all our “consumables”; all the plastic in the goods and their packaging; and all the landfills, garbage barges, and recycling centers where all our stuff winds up after we toss it into our curbside or alley-edge bins. I thought about the way all this consumerism drives our economy, supports our “standard of living,” and defines ahead of all else, what we have become.
By the time we pulled up to the curb at MSP to pick up our son and daughter-in-law, I was back in the Christmas spirit. Forget the “stuff.” Just give me time and talk with loves ones, and I’ll be “Ho-ho-ho!” for Christmas.
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
