Cancel Christmas!

I saw that they were installing decorations on the Shopping Mall in the centre of town yesterday.

Here, Brazil, the fact of it being Summer here makes this US importtion seem particularly bizzarre and unnecessary. The commercialisation ios especially ugly in a country where there are such huge dispartities of income.

I’m not against American traditions- for Americans! There is always something odd when one culture’s festivals are simply grafted onto another, without any adaptation to local conditions or attitudes.

Here is George Orwell on Christmas, and Utopias in general http://www.flickr.com/photos/28509471@N05/3153495566/

For Orwell, Dickens is successful in describing Chjritsmas as a happy occasion because the family who ar celebrating have been undergoing such difficult times immediately prior, and it’s a relief.

But what function does Christmas have in modern Western Cultures, where excess perhaps causes as much misery as does shortage? I mean excess of food, leading to obesity, excess of time, leading to irritability and purposelessness, excess of ease, leading to complacency and people becomeing physically unfit.

Wal-Mart security officials and the police cleared the store, swept up the shattered glass and locked the doors until 1 p.m., when it reopened to a steady stream of calmer shoppers who passed through the missing doors and battered door jambs, apparently unaware that anything had happened.

Ugly shopping scenes, a few involving injuries, have become commonplace during the bargain-hunting ritual known as Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. The nation’s largest retail group, the National Retail Federation, said it had never heard of a worker being killed on Black Friday.

Wal-Mart declined to provide details of the stampede, but said in a statement that it had tried to prepare by adding staff members. Still, it was unclear how many security workers it had at the Valley Stream store for the opening on Friday. The Green Acres Mall provides its own security to supplement the staffs of some large stores, but it did not appear that Wal-Mart was one of them.