- Omid-X to Agamem-X (his father) -
My lifegiver, as I wrote in the previous message (email 14), I have landed in Vancouver, Canada. I arrived just in time to observe the ritual of celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of a new year. One of the religions, called Christianity, calls these events Christmas and New Year, which have become planet-wide events, even in regions and countries that do not adhere to Christianity.
I know that these are no different from what we have on our planet, but what shocks me here is the mad rush we see among Earthlings to buy stuff and consume quantities of foods, objects and entertainment services. As an example, I saw, in the past few days, scores of adult lifegivers going around to over-crowded stores and stands and desperately asking for this or that toy or object, all because their little offsprings have asked for them. While I understand it and even appreciate it to a certain extent, the painful look on the faces of these people was heartbreaking and made me wonder what pleasure could there be in going through this ritual?
As puzzling as this phenomenon is to me, it is matched the day following christmas day with what is called in some countries the ‘Boxing Day’. It is an official holiday in some countries, in particular in many of what is called Commonwealth countries. Commonwealth countries are nations that were once subservient to England, one of the heavy-weights on Earth. Even though they have become independent now, I guess they cannot shed their servitude and most of these countries even consider the English Monarch as theirs. He/she is represented in the respective countries by a Governor General.
Anyways, back to Boxing Day. There are a number of stories about how this day got its name, but it is believed that one of the origins is that the day after Christmas, the rich and the lords in England boxed up gifts to give to their servants who had to work on Christmas day, but had Boxing Day off. On that day, they received a special Christmas box from their masters. The servants would spend Boxing Day with their families and share the contents of the boxes with them. I guess you can consider Boxing Day to be a Christmas Day for the servants and the poor.
Back to the consumerism bulimia that attacks especially strongly during the Christmas season. I recently had a conversation with Henry (my Earthling subject that I wrote you about) and he told me that he had read somewhere that holiday season’s buying habits are driven by a need to meet imagined expectations: ‘an attempt to bring happiness to loved ones’. And it is true that people are generally happy during gift-giving sessions. Nevertheless, overbuying, not to mention bulimic buying, causes emotional and financial distress.
This activity seems even more futile, when one realizes that many of the purchases end up in storage closets, donation piles, or trash cans. And that is where a transformation of Boxing Day has come about. On that day, the Earthlings who had been victims of the consumerism dictatorship, get to walk the city and return, exchange or offer their unwanted presents. What a virtuous cycle: spend weeks in agony of buying gifts, enjoy brief moments of pleasure exchanging them, then spend a full day trying to return the unwanted ones. I guess Earthlings have not discovered the pleasures of parsimony.
From Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada - 5 January, 2020 (Earth)