Christmas values slowly eroding

While I belong to a generation that gave the world The Beatles and the great social and political upheavals that paved the way for what has become the world of today, it was also a generation that came way way before there were malls or even decent shopping centers.

You may wonder what the connection is. Well, it is Christmas. That is the one connection that weaves through all the generations ever since Christmas became a yearly celebration of peace, love and happiness, and everything there is that makes people feel good about themselves.

So what about not having malls and shopping centers? Why, everything! Filipinos shop like crazy. And Christmas is the biggest shopping season of all. Those who have never experienced life without malls and shopping centers cannot imagine what life in the 1960s was like.

Then as now, classes would end for the Christmas break with the traditional Christmas party. But while the students of today have the malls and shopping centers to go to for their Christmas needs, those of my generation had very limited options for the same purpose.

When I was in grade school at the Colegio del Santo Niño, there were only two groceries within a two-kilometer radius of the school that we could go to to shop for presents for the required exchanging of gifts.

And with the presents limited to an earlier agreed value (in Grade Six in 1966, I think it was 50 centavos per gift, ha ha ha), it happened quite often that the present you bought for the exchanging of gifts will be exactly like the present you get afterward.

But there weren’t any complaints, for as long as the gifts were useful, as in wearable or edible, but preferably edible, like boxes of chocolate (we were kids then, remember?). What truly incensed us was when somebody would give something stupid like a bars of laundry soap.

I swear it happened that way occasionally. There is never any shortage of pricks, even during the Sixties. And there was only one inevitable conclusion when that happened — the giver and the receiver would end up in a fistfight. So much for Christmas and exchanging of gifts.

Today, exchanging of gifts has taken a drastic turn for the worse. What used to be a simple and often sincere exercise of Christmas cheer has become what to me a sort of hooliganism of gift-giving.

They have even assigned a new name for it, a name expropriated from an entirely different meaning — “wish list.” A wish list that is so appropriate in its original context of balancing need and priority has become a demand so inappropriate in the Christmas setting of gift-giving.

While it must be conceded that the desire to be appropriate and be appreciated has given gift-giving some degree of difficulty and challenge, this has more than aptly been addressed by the invention of the gift certificate.

The GC allows the receiver to choose his own gift. What can be more appropriate than that? But then some prick had to go beyond that and inveigled the wish list from its appropriate contextual meaning to become the new exchanging of gifts.

The new exchanging of gifts, reformatted as the new wish list, would now have the participants list the gifts they want to receive. If you ask me, this effectively kills the essence of gift-giving.

At least with the GC, the act of giving is still intact, even if the choice of a gift has shifted to the receiver. But with the wish list, the act of giving has been lost completely, taken over by the act of asking. It is no longer gift-giving but gift-asking.