People's desire to light up the night sky is never as strong as it is in mid-winter. All modern religions originating in the Northern Hemisphere have incorporated ancient solstice rituals into festivals of light. And so we have the Hanukkah candle lighting, the Persian Sadeh and Yalda festivals, the Hindi Diwali festival of lights, and the ubiquitous Christmas lights. To say nothing of the recent revivals of winter solstice celebrations.
But even in the midst of all this joy, we feel the need to outdo the neighbors. Once again the drive to show how cool we really are is alive and well. So much so that many cities and neighborhood associations are starting to step in and put an end to the posturing contest. Today's Wall Street Journal has an article entitled "Neighbors Clash Over Christmas Lawn Decorations" that highlights the problem. It appears some of the people featured in the article were inspired by the rather boring comedy Deck the Halls, where Danny DeVito attempts to make his tacky home visible from space. How does 50,000 lights sound to you?
But what is quite disturbing are some numbers cited in the article. In 2006, Americans spent $16B of their "discretionary" dollars on seasonal decorations, up almost 10% from 2 years earlier. And very few of these items are just static. Nearly all require energy to set up and run. Inflatable yard decorations, many of them well over 8 feet tall are the latest craze, with people spending nearly half a billion dollars on this segment alone. Many of those require constant inflation and nearly all are lit up round the clock to boot.
At the same time these consumers are fuming about rising energy costs. Given that the lighting craze mostly affects middle class neighborhoods, the ones that are said to be feeling the pain, one has to wonder how real this pain is. Are people feeling the pinch when it comes to adding another 10,000 lights?
It is quite obvious that Americans retain a profoundly wasteful attitude towards energy use and that their proclamations of wanting to fix global warming are lacking credibility.
The winter holidays are a true celebration of overconsumption and excess. Holiday spending is close to $450 billion. Fully one fifth of retail industry sales occur during the holiday season according to the National Retail Foundation. $450 billion is three times as much money as the nation spends on prescription drugs each year. And it is almost twice as much as the total annual charitable giving to all causes, except for disaster relief.
The total US economic and military assistance to the entire world -much of it in the form of military intervention and loans by the way- totaled $40B last year. That is only 10% of what consumers will spend on gifts and trinkets this holiday season. The true aid stands at $19B and it barely exceeds the $16B in seasonal decorations that we buy. And here are some more interesting numbers.
In 2006, we spent $1.2 billion dollars on "real" christmas trees and another $631 million on "fake" trees according to the National Christmas Tree Association. Those fake trees are petroleum products by the way. And most come from China too, adding a fair dose of air pollution along the way. The real trees only travel from Canada so they are relatively clean in comparison.
We spent more on Christmas trees last year than we did on foreign aid to Afghanistan. And no countries other than Iraq, Israel and Afghanistan received more than $1 billion in aid. Only one poor country, Ethiopia, received more in aid than we spend on fake Christmas trees each year.
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