A capitalistic spin on a beloved holiday
Walden Sullivan, Staff Writer
Every holiday season, Christmas becomes more and more commercialized. Stores raise prices, parents fight for survival on Black Friday and Hallmark movies become even more mindless. Large corporations have realized that they can just use Christmas as a cash grab, so sometimes there are Christmas sections and decorations put up in stores even before Halloween.
Much like Halloween, Christmas is used to make extreme amounts of money off of desperation. But unlike Halloween, Christmas is supposed to be centered around family, friends, love and traditionally, religious beliefs. Not everyone has to interpret or celebrate the holiday exactly the same, but it has gone way overboard.
One of the main ways to understand the commercialization of Christmas is Black Friday. On one holy day after Thanksgiving, millions of desperate gift buyers waste hours of their life and spend hundreds of dollars getting anything they manage to cling to during the festivities of this joyous Friday. There have been hundreds of Youtube videos that show stores on Black Friday where people get stampeded, physically moved out of the way and sometimes even punched or slapped for an item. Some people even ditch their Thanksgiving to camp outside of a store in preparation for the morning sales. This concept of one-day-only sales completely revolves around the fact that people will do anything to relieve the financial burden of Christmas and the holiday season.
In addition to Black Friday, Hallmark Christmas movies have become some of the most made fun of movies in history. In almost every movie, a couple meets in some “quirky” way, followed by boring writing, terrible humor and a rough patch in the relationship that is fixed by the miracles of Christmas. One movie, “A Christmas Wedding Tail,” did not stray from this format at all, becoming the number one most hated Hallmark movie on IMDb. In this 2011 “cinematic masterpiece,” a couple meets in a park when their two telepathic dogs make plans to get married. But of course, their couple’s kids don’t get along, bringing the family apart, so it’s up to the dogs to reunite the family for the biggest event of the holiday season. As you could probably tell from this summary, no thought went into this film. When you read plots of these movies out loud, they almost sound like parodies that belong on “Saturday Night Live.” These contentless movies are solely created to make money and nothing else.
Hallmark seems to be like the neverending rabbit hole of Christmas, and Oona Schuelweis (’25) agrees completely.
“Hallmark seems to make like 30 super [dreadful] movies a year that not many people actually enjoy, but they’ve been doing the same thing for years. I don’t get it,” Schulweis said.
Even though Christmas is now heavily commercialized, you can still celebrate however you want. You can choose to ignore the Hallmark movies, Black Friday sales and anything else that puts a damper on your holiday season to just focus on what you believe in.
Art by Auden Koetters