“There’s a lot of bad ‘isms’ floatin’ around this world, but one of the worst is com­mer­cial­ism. Make a buck, make a buck.“
–Alfred, Mir­a­cle on 34th Street (1947)

Did Thanks­giv­ing even hap­pen? Walk­ing around the neigh­bor­hood and scan­ning the store cir­cu­lars it seems more like some blip between Hal­loween candy and Christ­mas toys. In 1947, Alfred’s Christ­mas ism was a fast-footed sprint launched by Santa’s appear­ance at the end of the Thanks­giv­ing parade (though with all due respect for Mr Macy, for us old time Philadel­phi­ans the finale will always be a red-coated fire­man climb­ing into Gimble’s fifth floor).

What was a six week sprint for Christ­mas sales in 1947 has stretched out to the leisurely half-mile jog through the autumn months. Trea­cly remakes of hol­i­day stan­dards have been play­ing in malls for weeks. Box store work­ers who might have pre­ferred to spend time with their fam­ily on Thanks­giv­ing were pressed into ser­vice for pre-Black Fri­day sales (fed by the hype of arti­fi­cial scarcity, it feeds the gam­bler gene’s need for the big win). And today, server farms around the coun­try are over­heat­ing to meet the demands of the lat­est retail gim­mick, the seven-year-old Cyber Mon­day (proof that cap­i­tal­ism hasn’t for­got­ten how to dream up more “make a buck” isms).

And all for what? Most of us mid­dle class Amer­i­cans have every­thing we need. What we lack isn’t the stuff that line the shelves of Wal­mart super­stores and Ama­zon dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters, but the us that we’re too busy to share with one another.

I love the purity of ear­lier gen­er­a­tions of Quak­ers. They point­edly ignored Christ­mas, work­ing and open­ing their schools on the 25th. They would have undoubt­edly skipped the com­mer­cial­ism of the mod­ern con­sumer hol­i­day. But I’m not will­ing to go that far. In our fam­ily Thanks­giv­ing and Christ­mas is a time of togeth­er­ness and sea­sonal habits–tag­ging the Christ­mas tree, Sweetzel’s spiced wafers, mak­ing cook­ies and pies, vis­it­ing fam­ily. When I was young, my mother made a framed col­lage of my annual pho­tos with Santa, and while it once fas­ci­nated me as a doc­u­ment of Santa vari­a­tions, now the inter­est is watch­ing myself grow up. Today, our family’s Flickr col­lec­tion of Christ­mas rou­tines shows that same pas­sage of time. None of us need fall into the Hal­loThanks­Mas sea­son of make-a-buck-ism to find joy in togetherness.