Holiday season is a time to define your values

The malls are clogged, newspapers are fat, and some of the houses I drive past have been lit up since the day after Thanksgiving. We are in the midst of Consumptionfest, the year's most magical season.

We are all called upon to pay alms to the profits and to decorate our homes in green and red, colors that signify the expenditure of cash that bleeds us dry.

Ah, but what is that I hear? It is the voice of simple living, calling us to sheath our credit cards and garage our cars whilst we sit around the hearth playing with our little ones and knitting doilies for those we cherish.

And harken now to the call of the devout, admonishing us to remember the other holiday, you know, the one that often gets tacked onto Consumptionfest.

And over there, we are beckoned to by those who would have us remember the poor. Do you feel just a tiny bit of guilt about spending? Drop some coins in that bucket, or write a check.

It is time to find out who we really are. This is the season of our annual test of values.

You thought fighting crowds in toy stores was what made the holiday stressful, but that isn't it. This season is a test of personal and national values. There is no cheat sheet, and the answer code varies according to the person being tested, and we are all tested in myriad ways.

Do you love your relatives? Which ones and how much (calculate your answer in dollars, please)?

Are you excessively materialistic, or are you stuffed with compassion for the less fortunate? There will be pop quizzes every day.

Do you cherish the old values? Is that why you hate buying gifts, or are you just tight? Isn't creating jobs for store employees a community value?

We should all wish for world peace and for Everett to get a Boeing plant, but what's the harm in having a little fun, too?

If you love shopping, go for it. If you feel guilty about waste, don't waste. The thing is, we tend to worry about other people's definitions of the holiday season. Maybe we need to give each other a break.

There are as many approaches to the holiday season as there are personality types and life philosophies; one feels right, depending on who you are to begin with.

Unless you are one of those people who shops because of a persistent psychological disorder.

A piece in The New York Times on Sunday included a few essays by psychologists writing on consumer culture.

The latest research indicates some people buy, buy, buy because their lives are empty. Really, it's true. Or because they are full of self-doubt, or haunted by worries that can be quieted temporarily by the purchase of a new goodie.

Another essay said excessive consumption can be a way of denying one's mortality.

The following quotation is from the book, "Psychology and Consumer Culture: the Struggle for a Good Life in a Materialistic World," published by the American Psychological Association: "The notion that the urge to splurge is fundamentally defensive death denial above and beyond the quite legitimate pursuit of material comfort and aesthetic pleasure is supported by both the historical record and contemporary empirical research."

But I suppose that mostly applies to buying things for yourself. Buying things for other people is altruistic; you do it because you are good, and because you don't really have a lot of time to spend with them the rest of the year, so you have to make up for it somehow.

Consumer culture takes a pounding during the holidays. It's a season full of conflicts and symbolism and conflicting symbolism, the main time of year in which we weigh our higher ideals against the realities of our lives.

Giving, for instance, is a wonderful ideal, but when it is tied to buying, it can lose some of its purity.

The battle over values is laid out as all that is good and pure vs. all that is crass and evil, but really what most of us want is to find the place where life is in balance.

A few weeks of overconsumption isn't a problem. Doing it all year, every year, and basing a society on it, does raise a question or two.

Maybe we ought to be grateful for this annual opportunity to question ourselves about what we really are about. I hope you pass your test.

Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.