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"Consuming and buying is easier than resisting": has the time come to think of another type of Christmas for 2023?

2023-01-18T16:04:28.330Z


With the lights out of Vigo on Sunday, January 15, a festive season came to an end where recovery, after two years of pandemic, seems to have followed the path of hypertrophy 


“We are beginning the countdown to Christmas for November, December and January of next year!” Mayor Abel Caballero announced excitedly at the act of turning off the Christmas lights in Vigo, held on Sunday, January 15;

nine days after Kings.

Microphone in hand, before pressing the button to deactivate the 11 million LED lights installed in the city, Caballero also invited tourists to start booking for next winter (and autumn), after proclaiming that the city had lived a Christmas record, with the highest occupancy in history.

Although the mayor initially ordered that the lights be turned off on January 8 as a "gesture for energy reasons", the council decided to extend it for a week at the request of businessmen from the hospitality industry, the hotel sector and commerce.

A) Yes,

the lights and more than 400 Christmas carol speakers dotted the streets have been on for almost three full months, since November 19.

a quarter of the year.

Christmas in Vigo ("the best that any city on the planet did", as Caballero described it), has been the maximum exponent of a festive season marked by recovery from the rarefied previous years: 2020, the first Christmas in which they lived with the coronavirus pandemic, and 2021, when the infections skyrocketed again.

The long-awaited return to normality has arrived in style, with massive events, the Lottery breaking sales records and crowded stores and shopping streets, despite the energy crisis, economic inflation or unusually high temperatures for a time of year in which polar images or snowflakes have had more to do with the iconography of shop windows than with reality.

"We look for security and stability when we are surrounded by unknowns, and we find it in the things we consider normal," believes, consulted by ICON, Dr. Paul Harrison, co-director of the Laboratory of the Best Consumption and director of the Master of Business Administration of the Australian Deakin School of Business.

“The multiple crises that we have experienced in the last three years make us feel that we are losing control.

We may also be affected by what psychologists call the idyllic hindsight bias, the tendency to remember past events as more positive than they actually were.

The interpretation of what is normal can be influenced by this bias when people strive to return to normality.

A municipal cleaner collects a Christmas tree after the end of the festivities in Hamburg.picture alliance (dpa/picture alliance via Getty I)

In a 2015 article in

The Conversation

,

I Think, Then I Buy: Why Buying Nothing at Christmas is Harder Than It Sounds

, Dr. Harrison reflected on

Buy Nothing Day. ,

an annual boycott followed in various countries around the world as a complaint against consumerism (which in 2011 had a variant,

Occupy Xmas

, in reference to

Occupy Wall Street

).

“Capitalism is based on an ideology of dissatisfaction with our current state.

Most of us are constantly looking for ways to achieve a higher status and a better life through what we buy.

Consuming and buying is easier than resisting”, argues the academic.

“We are incredibly social animals, influenced by the need to provide plenty of food and gifts for our friends and family to value us.

Significant personal and psychological resources are needed to resist, especially at Christmas, these rites.

not so sweet christmas

Not everyone, however, has that longing for normality, much less an idyllic vision of Christmas.

A Swedish couple, for example, started a fundraiser last holiday to acquire the rights to

Last Christmas

, the well-known ballad by Wham!, and delete it from existence to prevent it from continuing to play.

At the end of last December, Tomas and Hannah Mazzetti had already raised $62,000, a figure significantly lower than the estimated $15 million the song costs.

Fed up with certain annoying phenomena associated with Christmas is justified: last Christmas Eve,

All I want for Christmas is you

, Mariah Carey's pop Christmas carol that will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2024, broke the record for listeners obtained by a song in a single day on Spotify, by being reproduced 21.273 million times in 24 hours.

In the last three years alone, the song has reached the weekly number 1 most listened to in the United States 12 times, according to the Billboard chart.

A person who doesn't enjoy Christmas doesn't have to be automatically caricatured as the Grinch either.

In addition to individual dramatic stories that can determine a negative perception of these dates, or harsh family situations, psychologist Joaquim T. Limonero, from the Spanish Society for the Study of Anxiety and Stress, recently spoke to EL PAÍS about the effects of not being able to manage the break in routine well or maintain a sense of control "during a period of time that covers more days each year".

Added to this is an economic outlay that may not be realistic and cause a person to struggle just by commitment.

“It is very difficult to avoid the pressure that comes with Christmas.

Thanks to the skillful conditioning of consumers by marketers, the amount of money we spend is equated with how much we value the other person, and challenging that norm can lead to unpleasant reactions ”, Dr. Paul Harrison reminds ICON .

"That notion is not good for (responsible) consumption or for the environment."

Reimagining Christmas culture and behavior can therefore be as urgent as it is an arduous task.

Not only for the residents of the center of Vigo who have collected more than 2,000 signatures in protest against noise, traffic and the difficulties associated with having "a huge theme park concentrated in the streets", but for the planet in general: for the damage that artificial night lighting brings to biodiversity (including human beings), due to the 30% increase in waste, part of it wasted food, to the addition of tens of thousands of tons of polluting gases daily... "Rituals such as Christmas and the holidays give us a sense of stability as we observe the chaos that surrounds us.

It's a basic survival mechanism.

although it does not take into account longer-term survival factors”, observes the academic.

“This is because we tend to emotionally overreact to new risks (the social proof of Christmas), and underestimate other risks that are abstract or distant to us, even though they are more likely to occur and have a greater impact. ”.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-01-18

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