What America Got For Christmas

Thousands of American families created their own Christmases this year. Call it home-Christmasing. We have posted at Revbilly.com some of the outrageous ideas that folks came up with this Christmas season. They concocted evenings with the tree with a new set of traditions, like rules that all gifts be found in the closets of the house, or in the indy shops within walking distance. Families invented musical comedies out of whole cloth, made original monopoly-like board games with brothers and sisters faces in the squares, sang carols for the neighbors with wild new lyrics in the songs…

Chain stores and big boxes - the corporate Christmas – with all the advertising, packaging, credit cards, sitting in traffic and standing in lines, and finally all that waste? This system was soundly rejected, maybe from exhaustion, or yes – being broke - but this new-style Christmas was done on purpose. The retail bubble really did burst, with estimates of the contraction ranging up to 8%. The New York Times reported an upsurge in gifts “that seem heartfelt.” Yes! A distinction was made this year between the grinning actors on the packaging and in the ads, and the actual warmth of more intimate experience. It came this year down to spending more time together.

We have come a long way from George Bush’s 9/11 equation of “shopping” with “fighting terrorism.” But you can’t find public figures who will guess at what our economy will look like in the future. Recently I was told by a Fox business anchor, “Our economy is 70% consumerism. The idea of starting up another economy is a moot point.” Wrong! This Christmas America gave itself a gift economy. We turned the solstice into what it was always supposed to be: the radical seed of Spring, the moment of Change.

Check the dramatic facts: 450,000 people joined community credit unions between March and September of this year. Startups of new companies continue at a record rate. We’re beginning new enterprises out of our garages, converting hobbies into money-making, establishing new tech companies on our personal computers, joining our neighbors in flea markets, selling their baking out of the back of their pick-ups at the green market. Local-a-lujah!

The ingenuity and practical get-to-it-iveness of Americans is an old cliché that happens to be true. Many of us know, it’s just common sense – our economic troubles don’t come from con-men like Ken Lay or Bernie Madoff. This corporate system will not protect us, and our own communities and our families most definitely will. Christmas the corporate way is stressful, debt-written and on the morning after Thanksgiving, even violent. We decided this year to fend for ourselves and we are doing it. The local economies suggested by home-Christmasing don’t register on the big board but there will be a public unveiling of a new American economy.

This Christmas, America gave itself a gift that will keep on giving. An America where local economies strike more of a balance with the big companies is clearly the up and coming idea. The bankrupt big boxes will become new local projects or returned to the fields and forests that were bulldozed. The commercial press will stop calling us merely broke and fearful and therefore penny-pinchers during the shopping season. We Christmased at home and in our local economies this year. We heard all the threats, the advertising still came at us, the Santas shouted and waved – but we quietly created our own Christmas.