Is Christmas Cancelled This Year?

You’ve probably heard the news by now that Christmas is cancelled this year. Well, it’s not exactly cancelled, but the economic supply chain disruptions have left a lot of store shelves so bare that it’s going to be very difficult for consumers to do the usual amount of holiday shopping this year. 

A recent guest editorial in the Wall Street Journal, written by a Mr. K. Kringle, mentioned my mom by name. The essay advised that the Jane Dunn Technique is our only hope this year. My mom’s shopping technique, developed with lots of scientific research, consists of buying one or two Christmas gifts every time she goes near a store throughout the entire year. Then she puts the gifts in various closets in the house. When the holiday season arrives, she wraps the gifts she can find, but typically loses track of about half of them, tucked behind clothing and shoe boxes in the closets. 

Then every April or May, while searching for a spring jacket, she’ll uncover a treasure trove of Christmas presents, which become birthday or anniversary gifts, or even a Christmas present for the next year, or sometimes the next decade. (One year my nephew, who was a college sophomore at the time, received some really nice Fisher-Price toys. He played with them all day long.)

The Jane Dunn Technique means you always have at least 180 percent more gifts in your house than you’ll ever need for a single holiday season, even if distant relatives suddenly show up unannounced on December 24th. 

However, the author of the WSJ opinion column noted that the only way at this point to employ the JDT is if you were lucky enough to have received as a Christmas gift last year a fully functioning time machine. This will allow you to go back in time to a moment long before Covid sent shock waves through the economy, and stock up on toys and electronics and all the other items that people are NOT going to find under the tree this year. A footnote to the column mentioned that the author, Mr. Kringle, is an executive in the shipping and distribution industry, so he knows what he’s talking about.

Speaking of my mom, the way economists are describing the upcoming Christmas shopping season, this year might be a nostalgic return to the Depression Era Christmases she remembers from her childhood. She swears that back then the greatest gift a child could find in his or her stocking was an orange. Yeah, an orange. I guess it was difficult in those days to ship citrus fruit from Florida to New Haven without it getting mushy and moldy, so an orange was a real treat. Also, back then coal in your stocking was not a punishment for being on the naughty list. It was another unexpected treat, which meant you could heat the house for another day. 

So, here we are, heading into the 2021 holiday season, and all the fun gifts people want are stuck on container ships anchored off the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. When I was at Stop and Shop the other day, they seemed to have plenty of oranges in stock. Maybe that’s where we should do our Christmas shopping this year.

Another really radical thing we could do this year is not obsess about material goods for a change and instead give our loved ones the gift of our time and attention. Don’t look at me with such a stunned expression. You know what I mean: spend some time with people and talk to them face to face, with no cell phones allowed. It would be very special. Then give them an orange.