Don’t get me started on how I loathe false nostalgia. Really, I could write dissertations on this subject, covering every genre from indie pop music to home décor. Really. False nostalgia may be the bane of my existence.
Today I saw an ad that set off my current false nostalgia anger twinge. “It’s not Christmas until someone finds the pickle.” Hooey. Somewhere on this great earth, there was once a tradition of hiding a glass pickle ornament deep inside the branches of the Christmas tree. Children looked for the pickle inside the tree, and that special discoverer got the prize of knowing he or she found the pickle first. The pickle has jumped cultures, however, and become a sappy faux nostalgic tradition for mass American culture, not actually rooted in ancestral celebration of the pickle at Christmastide.
The pickle ornament represents longing for that bygone era when Christmas was a simpler time, shoppers were more genteel, and children were more naïve. I don’t believe in that time. I believe there was a time in the past when people had less disposable income than us chubby 21st century United Statesers, and it was that lack that led the seemingly unsophisticated folks of yore to celebrate Christmas in a less cluttered way. If there had been more money, if there had been more toy advertising aimed at children, if the culture of consumption had speedballed earlier in American history, I don’t believe there would be any difference in how Christmas is celebrated today and how it was celebrated in the past. The past didn’t have a more pure tradition, there was no conscientious choice to make Christmas more symbolic of love and family, those are values projected on the past by contemporary Americans.
Thus, the pickle. The pickle symbolizes the false notion that Christmas used to be more meaningful and forces an artificial tradition on today’s children. Do kids really care about the nubby, ugly, green pickle ornament? I don’t think so. I used to work in a store where we sold the pickle, and only adults cared about the pickle, and then only after the “tradition” of hiding and finding the pickle was enthusiastically described to them. Kids picked out smiling fat snowmen, candy canes, red-nosed reindeer—those are the children’s traditions—while adults were aggressively pushed into faux nostalgia by trained salespeople.
Christmas can survive without the pickle tradition. Children don't need to find the pickle to create Christmas nostalgia. Christmas nostalgia happens when the same ritual happens from year-to-year, when hanging Christmas lights up to down or in circles, when the tree is decorated in tinsel or garland, when the music on the stereo is “White Christmas” or “Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree.” No one needs to find the pickle because Christmas already has its own nostalgia, without the fake sentiment forced in stores.
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1 comment:
"False nostalgia may be the bane of my existence."
No, germs are the bane of my existence. What was I thinking?
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