CHRISTMAS FOR SALE

The Christmas decorations are everywhere. They dangle from the ceilings, plastered on walls, and glitter in display windows. In the middle of the Ala Moana Shopping Center is a huge Christmas tree, intricately decorated with miniature doves, bells, colored balls and ribbons, sleighs, and all the ornaments that mark the Christmas season. I stand a few feet away, admiring the towering tree and then took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of fresh Christmas tree.

There are people everywhere. They snake in and out of the shops and eating places. Most are bargain seekers, looking for cheaper prices that come with the holiday season. It is November 28:  Black Friday. I never quite understood what Black Friday was all about, but heard that it is the first day of the shopping spree that marks the beginning of the Christmas holiday.

            “More like shopping crazy,” I said to myself as I watched people rushed by trying to catch the bargains. It was around 10:00am, and if the stories I heard were true, most of the shelves would have already been cleaned by early shoppers.

The previous evening, my four-year-old daughter and I drove past a Best Buy shop and saw a queue outside. It stretched for about half-a-mile. People had camped overnight, waiting for the shop to open at 5:00 am the next day.

            “Daddy, what are those people doing,” my daughter asked, innocent of the consumerism that grips this society.

            “They are crazy,” I said, more to myself than to her. Inside me, all kinds of thoughts, feelings, and questions turned in a whirl pool of consciousness. How could people be so obsessed, even addicted, to accumulating material goods? Do they need them? There were people dying in Africa, in wars that were connected to the extraction of raw material needed to make the gadgets that we greedily consume. There were people slaughtered and underpaid around the world to feed the consumerism of this society. I thought about the little that my people on the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal, in Solomon Islands, ever owned. I had lived in the US for nearly six years now, and still couldn’t understand. May be, I never will.

I was lost in my thoughts. A group of teenage girls walked past, chattering noisily. They were burdened with shopping bags. The fragrant of their perfume slapped me in the face waking me from my dreamy reflection. The scent was suffocating. I watched as the girls, wrapped in fancy attires, disappeared into the crowd. I wondered what their parents’ credit card bills will look like, come New Year.

The previous day was Thanks Giving, another uniquely American holiday. I stayed home and taught my four-year-old daughter to ride her bike without training wheels. That evening my family had a BBQ, just the five of us. Perhaps, that was what Thanks Giving was all about – spending time with the family and thanking each other.

The entire week we were overwhelmed with advertisements announcing the beginning of Christmas sales. They were everywhere, screaming from TV screens, radios, newspapers, and online. There were posters and billboards of all shapes, sizes, and colors. On the previous day, tucked inside the local dailies were brochures from department stores like Wal-mart, Macys, Nordstrom, Sears, K-mart, Best Buy, Longs, and the list goes on. Even in the shopping mall, above where I stood, there was a huge TV monitor that clang to a wall, throwing commercials at passers by.

You couldn’t escape them. They were like drug dealers, pushing people to buy the latest model of iPod, cell phones, and other gadgets that became fashionable over night. Fashion was the name of the game. They made people feel like they gotta own these things, even if they couldn’t afford them and didn’t need them.

The big thing this year was GPS gadgets. On the bus the previous day, I overheard a conversation between two women. “I gotta buy a GPS for my brother-in-law,” said the first lady. “He is always getting lost.” She was fat and wore a tight red blouse that made her look like an oversized version of Red Riding Hood. I wondered what her brother-in-law looked like.

            “I need one for myself. I sometimes get lost coming from Kaneohe to Honolulu,” the second lady responded, not wanting to be left out. I wondered how she got lost riding the bus. And even if she was driving, all she needed to do was get the H3 or Pali Highway and that would take her to Honolulu without the need for GPS. I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why anyone would need a GPS on Oahu. But, that was the fashionable gadget and it was selling like hot cakes.

As I stood there crowd-watching someone bumped into me. It was a homeless man. He obviously hadn’t seen a shower for a couple of days, maybe weeks. He was dirty and smelled of dried pee and other stuff. He looked drunk, perhaps doped with some kind of hallucinating drug. His t-shirt was so soiled you could barely read the writing on the front. It said: “Mele Kalikimaka”. That’s, “Merry Christmas” in Hawai’ian. With his left hand, he held up his trousers, which was also dirty and fetid. It looked oversized, or maybe he had grown smaller after years without proper shelter and food. With his right hand he pushed a shopping trolley – they call them carts here – loaded with plastic bags and other goodies that were old and dirty and looked like they had been fished out of a ditch. I stopped breathing for a few seconds as he walked past and dragged along the foul smell that floated around him.  

Shoppers moved away, some shut their nose with their palm, as he staggered through the shopping mall with his trolley. They looked at him with screwed-up faces as though he was an alien from another planet who had invaded their space. Indeed, he looked out of place, a contrast from the expenses of the shopping mall. He didn’t belong here. He belonged to the streets and parks. The look on people’s face as he past them was entertaining.

And then he stopped. He turned his shopping trolley and looked straight at me. Our eyes met. There was something about him that gripped me. It was as though he could see through my soul. I froze. Hanging on the front of his shopping trolley was a cardboard paper, and on it, written in big bold letters, were the words: “CHRISTMAS FOR SALE”.

It suddenly made sense. If Christmas was all about selling things, including our souls, then why not sell Christmas itself. I am not a particularly religious man, but I looked at the homeless man and wondered what happened to “Christ” in “Christmas”.

Slowly, I walked up to him. I could feel my soul kicking. I fished out a ten dollar bill from my shirt pocket and placed it in his hand. I then walked out of the shopping mall carrying a little smile on my face. I had bought my Christmas.