Margaret Deland Quotes

I have to confess that I've never been a great fan of Christmas or, as it's known in our house, The Monster That Ate the Last Third of the Year. It's mostly the rampant consumerism I object to, but I'm also a little wary of the annual crop of new Christmas stories and sometimes wonder why anyone bothers.

Christians have created a holiday that has become a beast that cannot be fed. Christmas gets longer and longer and longer, and you don't care, do you? You just take more and more of the calendar for yourself. It's unbelievable. How long does it take you people to shop? It's beyond belief. It's insane. When I was a kid, Halloween was Halloween, and Santa wasn't poking his ass into it.

It's a sad commentary on our time - to use a phrase much favored by my late father - that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies.

Wretched excess is an unfortunate human trait that turns a perfectly good idea such as Christmas into a frenzy of last-minute shopping.

We Americans commercialize everything. Look at what we did to Christmas. Christmas is Jesus' birthday. Now, I don't know Jesus, but from what I read he was the least materialistic person who ever walked the earth. No bling on Jesus. He kept a low profile and we turned his birthday into the most commercial day of the year. In fact we have a whole Jesus birthday season. And then at the end of it, we have the nerve to have an economist come on TV and say what a horrible Jesus birthday season we had.

Oh look, yet another Christmas TV special! How touching to have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food, and beer... Who'd have ever guessed that product consumption, popular entertainment, and spirituality would mix so harmoniously?

Consider Christmas - could Satan in his most malignant mood have devised a worse combination of graft plus bunkum than the system whereby several hundred million people get a billion or so gifts for which they have no use, and some thousands of shop clerks die of exhaustion while selling them, and every other child in the Western world is made ill from overeating - all in the name of the lowly Jesus?

For me personally, there's too much fashion around in this world.

I think we've taken the meaning of Christmas out. People don't stop and think about Jesus or the birth of Jesus. When they think of Christmas, they think of Santa Claus and - for the children, and they think of giving gifts and out-giving the next person of spending their time looking for the right thing for somebody who has everything.

There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.

I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,' and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.

December 25th has become guilt and obligation.

I hate Disneyland. It primes our kids for Las Vegas.

In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea.

Many a family, in order to make a 'proper showing,' will commit itself for a larger and more expensive house than is needed, in an expensive neighborhood. Almost everyone would, it seems, like to keep up with the Joneses.

Nowadays the rage for possession has got to such a pitch that there is nothing in the realm of nature, whether sacred or profane, out of which profit cannot be squeezed.

Some people see Black Friday as a much-needed break for their wallet. I see it as retail outlets showing the customers the full weight of their contempt. The frenzy to buy cheap crap from China, the human downgrade of people fighting with each other over items they can probably live without, to me, is an insult.

Everything is so aggressively marketed at every age: if you're not in Baby Gap, you're not cool. That's how everybody's grown up, so they don't even know it could be another way.

Fashion is one of the most intellectually vacuous industries. We had to manufacture desires to get people to buy our products. We were selling people countless things that they didn't need.

Consumerism is the reason Christmas has morphed into a hollow shopping ritual that leaves too many families with debt hangovers and an empty feeling inside.

Belief is invisible, so there is enough space for everyone's. Except in the shops at Christmas.

Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all.

Merry Christmas to all. A Pagan holiday (BC) becomes a Religious holiday (AD). Which then becomes a Shopping holiday (USA).

The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.