What do you want for Christmas Essay -- Essays Papers

What do you want for Christmas â€Å"Attention holiday shoppers, don’t miss your opportunity to have your picture taken with Santa and his Elves. And today only Macy’s special holiday sale†¦Ã¢â‚¬  Think back to last year. For the Holidays what did you give and what did you get? I can almost guarantee you that for the gifts you bought you either spent long hours searching a department store or long hours racking your brain for what to buy. The perfect gift, where can I get it? And how much will it cost? Why is it that we can’t just tell someone how much we care? Corporations in our society have placed such an emphasis on finding the perfect gift that we can no longer settle, for homemade toys. As a child what is it that you actually understand? Is it the meaning of the holiday or what the holiday brings to you? I can recall as a child running down the stairs to peek at what Santa had brought me. According to my religion, Christmas was meant to be a celebration for the birth of Jesus. Instead it has become a commercial holiday based upon how much we spend on each other. We have put aside traditional values for the most part, by masking them with material gifts. Consider this. Is it any coincidence that most stores do a majority of their business between November and February and several major holidays fall in this range; Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, New Years and Valentine’s Day. What about Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year? On that day billions of people across our nation leave their homes to flood the malls in search of Christmas or Hanukkah gifts. This holiday season has been predicted to bring in over $180 billion. Each year the annual holiday sales rise by approximately 5%. (CNN) Stores explo... ... newer products to draw us in. If we don’t go all out for the Holidays we too will become Ebinieser Scrooge or the Grinch who Stole Christmas. Our corporations have set the standards for our holiday shopping. It is something that you cannot escape. Our corporate giants have told us that in order to tell someone you care, you must go out and spend. â€Å"Those who have the money make the rules.† It just so happens that the ones with the money are the heads of the exact companies that you go to, with your holiday needs. They call us to their stores to shop, and like zombies we go. Trudging through the stores on our mission to buy the perfect gift and to spend, just as we have been told. Works Cited Retail Insider. Executive Decisions Systems Inc. October 1994. Lenihan, Rob, Black Friday Brings out Green. CNN America, INC. New York, November 25, 1999.