There are four times a year I especially hate shopping in big box stores: Valentines, Easter, Halloween and Christmas. That's because the buffet of merchandise thrust in our periphery forces us to think about that next holiday coming up in... three months.
Forget about how they rush time on us. What about the sea of items dangled in front of our children enticing us to think we ought to buy? Our senses are accosted with stuffed, plastic, candied nothings. Wastes of money, all of it. Not one of the plastic toys will last a few days. The confetti paper will clog the vacuum and the candy-shaped items are insipid.
All this does is teach our children to become good consumers with poor taste. Especially when a recent kid movie is tied in to the holiday with their own low quality merchandise.
Parents: there is more to talking with your kids than asking them if they like their Smurf hat. There is more to any holiday than getting stuff. There is more to life than following what the marketers want you to waste your money on. Especially if you are on subsidy. Rather than bemoan what you can't afford, teach your children all of this junk is out there to tease people into wasting money.
Any holiday can be celebrated as a family without a monogramed pail, yard sign or special toothpaste. The big box retailers have successfully assisted in watering down North American events by having a special napkin we'd better buy or we won't be celebrating correctly. What happened to making your own paper ornaments? Baking together - not from the kit sold in the store?? Reading or acting out an event? Creating a memory does not cost a cent, folks. Don't be fooled by the ads you see. They are just doing their job - to get you to think you need their stuff in order to make your holiday happy.
When my kids were preschoolers, I taught them that commercials and ads were there to trick people. Their job was to make us think we had to "have more, need more or want more". Initially they both told me that couldn't be true, because it was on TV! But I was relentless. Even their beloved TV that played their special shows or DVDs existed for the very same reason. They began to learn that everyone who speaks isn't necessarily speaking truth, and slowly they began to realize things for themselves. It didn't take too many intentionally purchased dollar toys for them to see how quickly they broke. And before they hit the double digits, both began to think about saving money for something made better and longer lasting.
Our Easter baskets reflected fun, of course. But they also pointed toward the real reason we celebrate Easter in the first place - the gift of forgiveness and eternal life by Jesus Christ's death and resurrection. Yes there was a bit of candy, but there was also a book or DVD to reinforce what we were teaching about godly character. After I realized how cheap baskets broke and other baskets added to the clutter, I used the same two baskets year after year. They came out the night before Easter and went back in a closet the day after.
I resolved not to follow the commercialism that multiplies generationally. It gets harder and harder, doesn't it? As parents, we get to choose what our kids are taught. If you don't want your kids focused on getting things - especially poorly made things that mess up your house - you can take a refreshing stand. Use the mind you have that the advertisers are trying to dull.
I like to imagine what it was like 100 years ago before so many more material goods developed. The meaning of the event was the point - not the stuff around it.
#Nostalgic
