The Good News and the Bad News

If I was reading the papers correctly, things have begun better this holiday season than last year. More people at the mall; more people buying big ticket items; more people shopping and spending. That is the good news. Americans buying things is the engine that drives our economy. And the holiday season is the month that makes or breaks most retailers. Which puts us as a society in a very strange place. We are desperate to encourage shopping in this month after Thanksgiving. We want people to buy and buy in uncontrollable excitement.

And yet there is the every increasing pressure to divest our society of its Christian trappings. There is this economy need for the holiday season to be big and to be a time of great shopping and gift giving. But there is an alternative pressure to diminish the reason for the celebration. There has been some effort to try to commercialize the religious traditions of other religions and to create new holiday celebrations which could be used to fuel shopping. It is not an easy tight rope to be walking.

So one might read the data that was being reported as another piece of evidence for good news. The retailers were reporting this week that there were more and more shopper out this Black Friday and that most of the shoppers were out shopping for themselves. They were not buying gifts for others. They were buying items they had been wanting and waiting for the sales. The consumer is back and he/she is just as selfish as every. That is the good news. Buying for themselves the big ticket items, the high tech gadget, and the luxury item long delayed. That is good news from two sides. One, it may mean that this year's bottom line will be black and two, the more selfish the shopping the further it gets away from the Christmas spirit and Christian concept of gifts for others. We will have a robust economy and we will not have to worry about the shopping being inspired by the Christian ideals of gifts for others. That may be both the good news and the bad news.