Canadian Mennonite
Volume 9, No. 23
November 28, 2005
The call of the mall
The message that things matter more than anything else is at its height during the weeks before Christmas. Canadians spend more at retailers during the Christmas season than any other time of year (with Halloween now an astonishing second in terms of consumer spending, according to the Retail Council of Canada).
Almost everywhere we look these days, we are told that money can buy love, riches can repair relationships, that luxuries are now essentials—with nothing down and no payments for 90 days. Our consumer economy tells us that the decisions that matter all boil down to a choice between this thing or that thing.
The whole idea of a giving even starts to look a lot like getting when we trade Christmas lists and then act as each other’s personal shoppers with delivery due on Dec. 25.
Our most important public spaces, once churches or town halls, are now malls. In some cases, our airports and churches are now even designed to look like malls. “The mall becomes our cathedral of consumption and Santa our patron saint,” writes scholar James Farrell in One Nation under Goods: Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping. “We all join the repeated processional and recessional throughout the season. Muzak carols are our sacred hymns; the food court is our communion table. We pray for bargains, and if we find them, the sale is our salvation. While the church doesn’t sell indulgences any more, the mall does sell indulgence, and many of us buy. The cash register is the tabernacle that contains the Holy of Holies, the Almighty Dollar, and the sales counter is the altar upon which we sacrifice our money and our lives for the redemption that consumption promises to bring.”
When someone is starving and then gets as much food as they want, they’ll eat until they are sick. In Canada, for the past 15 years, consumer spending has consistently grown faster than personal disposable income. As of 2004, according to Toronto Dominion Bank figures, this trend finally wiped our national personal savings rate to zero percent and lifted personal debt levels to a record high of 113 percent of personal disposable income. Are more things really what we are starving for?
Earlier this month I got a lesson on giving. I was over at a friend’s place enjoying an invitation for supper. During conversation about our lives, I commented that I had a lengthy series of board and church meetings coming up and my watch had just broken, making it hard to know when to pick people up at hotels and coordinate meeting schedules. Moments later, one of my hosts simply took off her watch and offered it to me for as long as I needed it. I was totally floored because it was such an unexpected offer—a profoundly countercultural thing to do. That watch got me through my meetings.
I don’t think that giving material gifts at Christmas is wrong. It’s a genuine way to express love. However, as Christians, we need to sort very carefully through the values we hear all around us right now. The message that Christmas is all about shopping is a consumerist con job.Perhaps this Christmas can be an occasion to do creative things like sharing lists of “borrowables” with one another. Sharing care, skills, things, food, time and other resources can all be much deeper tributes to the celebration of God’s gift to us than a swipe of plastic might be.