Technology is Ruining Christmas
I swear, every year this gets harder and harder
I still remember the magic of Christmas Day as a child—waking up to a glittering tree towering over piles of colourful boxes. The tree was plastic and it got shit everywhere, the fronds broke off and stuck in the carpet, the cheap glittery baubles rubbed off on everything, but we didn’t have to worry about any of that because we were kids and cleaning up our bullshit wasn’t our problem on this particular day.
Now that I’m doing the Christmas thing as a grown ass adult man, I now see everything through that lens. I don’t have kids myself, but there are kids in the family and boy howdy does this get harder every single year.
Shopping for kids is easy enough up to a point. That point is the precise age when they are old enough to use a computer and then everything just falls apart. Little kids? Those are easy, they’re like cats, they like anything that moves or makes a sound or smells funny. Even easier is when their malleable brains learn the concept of brand loyalty and they can specifically tell you which animated dog they want plastered over every object in their direct radius.
But then they reach that age where they learn how to sit at a computer unsupervised and they immediately become Entirely Online. Then what do you do, friends?
Then what do you do?
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Once kids discover video games, it’s all over. When I was a kid and I started getting into video games that meant Sega Genesis cartridges. Those things were tangible objects that came in a box and cost sixty bucks a pop, once the festivities calmed down and the adults went off to do their own thing on the patio, we used to cram those things into the console and there was the rest of your afternoon sorted.
Now what are you going to put under the tree? An empty box with a note inside that says “Good morning small child I have emailed you a Steam voucher code”? I could scribble a picture of a snowman on it, if that helps?
If this is what we have done to our culture then RETVRN, I say. You can’t buy a child an app for Christmas. I’m not going to gift you a month of microtransactions for that game where you have to pay 30 cents to make Mario jump over the toilet.
I have absolutely no memory of ever having believed in Santa Claus although I did have the situational awareness to pretend to believe so as not to ruin my parents’ fun. We did the whole leaving a glass of milk and some cookies out routine—I knew who ate those damn cookies. What I should have done was eat the cookies myself in order to force an epistemological conundrum: They would know I did it, obviously, and I would know that they knew, but they wouldn’t know that I knew that they knew.
Still, even though I knew who the presents really came from, I never gave much of a thought to how they got the stuff they got. I wager the holiday shopping experience was quite a bit different to what we put up with now. They had to actually travel to the shopping centres, presumably, which means there must have been a large variety of stuff to choose from, right there in the open, browseable. You didn’t need to know what you were looking for, stuff was just there on display.
Now that Amazon has moved the shopping experience Entirely Online I don’t know how to shop without the internet. But that’s just the problem because I don’t know how to shop on the internet either. It’s the tyranny of the blinking cursor.
The kids like arts and crafts, according to their parents after I grovelled to them, defeated, for tips on how to appease their spawn. But what of it? I like arts and crafts too but that’s a big god damn umbrella. Try typing anything craft related into Amazon and every single product is called “Art Craft Foil Activity Fun Animals No Mess Art For Kids Craft & Supplies DIY Crayon Mess Free For Boys & Girls Gift Set Skill Creativity Ages…...” and there’s a picture of a fucking octopus.
And that’s Amazon. I don’t like shopping with Amazon for ethical reasons but it’s one of those things where it isn’t a hard boycott, just an icky feeling—the guy who owns it is plainly very evil, but also very far away, so kind of the same feeling I get from using Twitter. But where else am I going to go? Where else sells things? Thinking about it makes me freeze up. Is Ebay still a thing at all? There’s Etsy if I’m willing to sell the children to afford it.
I’m the kind of guy who likes to purchase things that I can actually hold in my hands and look at before I hand over the money. This kind of tangible physicality feels like it’s essential to the ritual, it makes the thing actually real. It’s how God intended people to trade goods. You know what it looks like and you avoid any surprises. If I’d done things the old fashioned way when I bought that bread loaf baking tray the other week then I wouldn’t have wound up with something the size and shape of a mass market paperback copy of Dune.
The adult side of Christmas is a whole entire other flavour of situation. On the one hand, adults are easier to shop for because I have a better idea of what adults like. On the other hand the problem is the answer to that is not many things. You buy a guy a nice electric razor set one year, he likes it, and it feels like the problem is solved, but then another year comes around like an asshole and you realise this isn’t a solvable game. You can’t get another razor, we did this already, what the hell is this Sisyphean bullshit?
Adult Christmas is a strange ritual to begin with because it’s a zero sum situation. Birthdays I get, birthdays are fine, someone manages to survive another year and you congratulate them for successfully thwarting mortality and remembering to breathe and eat for another twelve months straight by giving them stuff and being nicer to them than you ordinarily would. It’s the reciprocity of Christmas that makes no sense. Two people giving exchanging gifts at the same time—and there’s kind of an unspoken pressure to ensure they are of roughly equal value even though, if you’re like me, you want to give everybody something really shiny.
Each year I find myself leaning more heavily into food to impress Christmas guests, because food is kind of the perfect thing for this and I’m not just speaking in my capacity as a fatass. Computers can’t ruin food because they don’t understand it (or so I learned from the Matrix movies) and also you can’t just replace it with some microtransaction or electronic voucher. Adults need it, kids need it, and they’re happy getting the same thing every damn year.
So until you figure out how to download a honey glazed ham, the digital age can’t stop you from having a good time at my Christmas.
I feel this in my soul and have also settled on food as a great gift for the hard-to-shop-for. Fancy truffle salt, fancy cheese (Murray’s has a fantastic alp blossom cheese that is covered in flowers and makes a lovely gift), obscure chocolates (Dr Bronners chocolate is surprisingly yummy and has a delightful backstory), that sort of thing.
I lean hard into homemade gifts, and yes if you're not crafty or artistic or a baker or cook, someone on Etsy is and is willing to sell you a thing. I've made variety tins of different flavors of Chex mix, those baking mix jar gifts, tinctured flavored liqueurs, hand-painted coasters, roasted flavored nuts, etc etc. There's also a reason that Swiss Colony and Thing-Of-The-Month outfits are still popular.
If all else fails, I live less than 2 hours away from a Yankee Candle outlet and it's always good for getting in the spirit and finding gifts for people.