Be Your Own Keeper

I’m back, and today I’ll be divining into the issue of personal responsibility. As you might imagine, I will frame this discussion against the backdrop of the holiday season.

So what is “personal responsibility”? In my viewpoint, personal responsibility is about embracing the things that you can control and taking charge of those things. You can’t correct all the world’s ills on your own, but you can help those you come across. You can’t control what others say or do, but you can control what you do.

What others say and do has no direct bearing on what we as individuals say or do. Someone says something stupid, insensitive, insulting, we have the freedom of self to agree, disagree, or say absolutely nothing in return. If we see someone speeding, we may not be able to do anything about it, but we don’t have to mimic them too; let them speed on ahead.

And we don’t have to buy everything that we see in TV commercials or internet ads. Retailers can make them as enticing as they like, but ultimately it is our personal choice and decision about whether or not we buy that thing they’re selling.

That’s why it annoys me somewhat when we get to this time of the year and I hear people complaining about how “commercialized” Christmas has become.

What gets me the most is how often it is that the ones complaining about the commercialization of Christmas are standing in a store parking lot with bags of stuff they just bought, stuffing their SUV full.

Has Christmas become more commercialized? It’s hard to see how that isn’t the case. However, I think one only need look in the mirror if they have a question about whether their own Christmas is more commercial than it should be. Because what Christmas is like for one person is determined by that one person.

There was a big hubbub this year as several retailers decided that they were going to change the way they approached Black Friday this year. Instead of opening the Friday morning bright and early, or before sunrise, or at the stroke of midnight, several retailers decided they were going to open on Thanksgiving Day itself, some as early as Thanksgiving morning.

Now, we can spit as much righteous indignation as we may like at the stores that did this. We can lament the plight of the minimum wage workers who have seen one of the few days off throughout the year they get for their family taken away. We can scream and shout for the CEOs and owners of these companies to reverse course next year.

Chances are they won’t. Because as the numbers are looking so far, they got quite a good bit of business, and that’s what they care about. Their concern is with how much money they can make, and with so many people walking their stores and spending money, rather than retreat from this year’s practice, likely more stores will try it so they won’t lose out to their competitors.

And while it’s tempting and tantalizing to blame the greedy corporations for trying their best to suck the last penny from the paying public, or the last ounce of productivity and effort from their workers, the countermeasure is rather simply a matter of personal responsibility.

Because these companies make decisions based cenrtrally, and in many regards solely, on what brings them more profit, it’s an easy calculation to see what their actions are likely to be at any given point in time and how to prompt them to reverse course. Simply put, if we stopped spending money at these stores on these days, if we stopped lining up days in advance like addicts looking for a fix, they wouldn’t see any incentive to pushing the start time for their big sale day deeper and deeper into what is supposed to be a day we get together and celebrate with our family and friends, looking back on the year and giving thanks for all of the blessings and fortunes we’ve received, not spending a fortune on gadgets and knickknacks likely to be thrown out or replaced in a year’s time anyway.

My point isn’t to begrudge the bargain hunter. I know a number of people who put off major purchases until this time of year precisely so that they can save money on those big ticket sale items. My point is that the majority of the sales this holiday season are not that. And the vast majority of the sales on those two days are not people in dire need of bargains… they’re the ones stuck in the stores working.

My point is that if you think the holidays have become too commercialized, it says more about the way you and those around you celebrate the holidays than anything else. You don’t have to try to keep up with the Jones’. You don’t have to rush to buy the latest of whatever, or run out after dinner on Thanksgiving Day just to get into a store and buy a bunch of stuff you may or may not need to spend time and money on. It’s your own choice if you want to buy or if you don’t want to buy. It’s our own choice as to how we celebrate the Christmas holiday. If we don’t like how much of a commercial feel it has, all we need do is change our approach.

There are many things in this world that are out of our control. But we have many others that we can control. We need to break the temptation of blaming others for our own failures to take responsibility for our personal actions.