The Way We Celebrate Christmas Has Changed
Has Christmas Become Too Commercialized?
Sometime during the last 2,000 years Christmas became a very commercialized holiday. The face of Christmas has changed. Christmas used to be a more festive and warm holiday. Nowadays, Christmas is highly commercialized. What ever happened to the days when children received just a gift or two? Currently, most children have grand expectations of receiving a tree full of gifts. With all the hustle and bustle, the spirit of the Christmas season has been lost.
How Has Christmas Changed?
The most visible way that Christmas has changed has to do with all of the foods that are part of Christmas celebrations. There are many food traditions associated with Christmas. Nowadays, you can buy commercially prepared foods for almost any of the foods commonly associated with Christmas. You can buy refrigerated cookie dough that you can simply slice into cookies and bake in the oven. You can also buy frozen cookie dough. The wide availability of commercially-prepared Christmas foods is completely changing many Christmas traditions. Sure, store-bought cookie dough can save you time, and many busy families rely on timesavers. However, making convenience a priority has caused us to lose the magic of the season.
We're Drowning in Commercial Eggnog
Eggnog is another food tradition commonly associated with Christmas. Eggnog comes in convenient cartons in the dairy section of your grocer’s freezer. You will also find eggnog at many upscale coffee shops throughout the Holiday season. You can even order an entire Christmas dinner from major national restaurants or even local shops. It’s certainly possible to make it through the entire Christmas season without doing one single thing the old fashioned way. Not only is the good taste of home cooked food lost, the time spent together preparing that food is lost too. Making meals from scratch might be more labor intensive, but the time spent together preparing that food is what truly makes it special.
It doesn’t look like Christmas will become less commercialized anytime soon. It’s safe to say that Christmas has changed in some irreversible way.