Shadowboxing with Boxing Day

Christmas has passed and many of you will go out today to partake in that great capitalist hoarding known as Boxing Day. Starting today and continuing for the rest of this week, most large retailers will mark down their wares in the hopes of sucking out whatever dollars might be left in the pockets of shoppers everywhere. With the crush to get everything they could for everyone on their Christmas lists now out of the way, the typical Canadian shopper, now more than $800 lighter in their pockets on average, is heading out onto the streets to take care of me.

Not that there's anything generally wrong with people buying items for themselves. In fact, if people didn't do that, how would they survive (since Christmas is but once a year)? People work so they can provide for themselves. But Boxing Day is crazy.

As a child, I remember December 26 as a time when people stayed home because stores were not legally permitted to open. The big sales didn't start until December 27. Now the "other Christmas holiday" is holy all right -- the holiest of shopping days. Kneel and pay homage. Save us from deprivation and want, oh glorious shops and stores of Robson, Yonge and Ste-Catherine. Get your groove on. And keep the plastic in your pocket warm. It's going to be quite the workout.

I'm finding it tougher and tougher not to be cynical about consumerism's excesses. As life moves along and surviving becomes harder, I know I cannot participate in the craziness directly, even if I wanted to (and I don't). As I see kids and adults everywhere tinkering with the new toys of the new millennium, I begin to wonder if there's a point of happiness in all of this. And I don't think there is -- covetousness knows no bounds in the human experience and even though the holy books prohibit it, wanting what other people have is a very real fact of life in Western society.

Once this week ends and the New Year is upon us, people take the time to look at the financial damage -- sky-high credit card bills and empty bank accounts -- and suffer through the cold of January penniless and (sometimes) stressed. We shop 'til we drop to keep up with the Joneses and every year the painful bite it takes out of people gets a little sharper, a little deeper. And then there are those who can't afford to get in the game who feel inadequate to the task of being a truly Westernized family. Or the poor who sacrifice everything to make Christmas happen and then have nothing left for the immediate future. The jeopardy people place upon themselves to be part of the Christmas phenomenon means that belongings have become more important than protecting our belonging.

And what does that really say about us?