Memory Lane
Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.
What my parents said about the festive season...
Thirty years ago, I first heard my parents say "Christmas is so commercialised these days!" and, being only a little tacker in those days, I just couldn't see how such a magical time could be thought of as commercialised.
Now I'm older and wiser, and I know where all those presents under the tree come from, and hell if I don't believe my parents finally... I saw an ad for a women's magazine on the TV the other evening, and it included ' your five free gold stars' and an article about ' how to use your free gold stars to add a personal touch to your Christmas ' inside it. And I started thinking about all that, and opened a whole can of worms in the process...
For example - gold stars. Cost next to nothing, just gold covered card cut on a press, and honestly, even as a kid I would have been offended to be offered such crap, even for free that's just plain snake-oil salesmanship... Sort of like a handful of blue glass beads only cheaper...
And having insulted their entire readership (who, come to think of it, probably deserve the insult, because they're obviously still buying that patronising, cheap drivel rag) they then use that gift as a way to fill up a couple of extra pages. I mean, what can you do to 'personalise' your Christmas with five gold stars which are as depersonalised as you can get? Stick them to something, same as the other 800,000 readers of the magazine who after all got the same gift and the same article? Argh, give us a break!
That's the commercialism part covered. Now for the obligatory 'back in de good old days' whinge:
My mother was probably a halfway houseproud woman, but she didn't go to extraordinary lengths to 'personalise Christmas' either, we used off the shelf streamers garlands and tinsel and decorations. Even back then, the only people who had the time or resources to 'personalise' their Christmas were bored affluent wives of high-income earners, and they added the personal touch because it was missing in their lives. Nowadays, even less people have the time and resources to go to any great lengths to add personal touches.
Most people will use their off the shelf bits just as they've been doing for thirty years, and have the same 'commercial' trees as everyone else, the same 'commercial' decorations, and (probably) sigh and complain bitterly about how commercial Christmas has become...
These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.
I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.
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