Christmas culture is a particularly nasty form of consumerism because:

• instead of buying products for yourself, you’re buying them for someone else, so you’re even less equipped than usual to determine if the products you’re buying will be put to use or if they will go to waste
• this also means that you’re even more susceptible to marketing and scams, because you may not understand exactly what you’re buying or what is wanted
• consider also that if the giftee really wanted whatever gift the gifter is buying them, they would have already bought it for themselves. the only time this isn’t true is when the gifter is willing/able to spend more money than the giftee, which is not a good dynamic either
• Christmas culture shames people for giving gifts that were not bought from a store (like used/secondhand gifts), which of course increases waste and funnels money to corporations
• Christmas culture shames people for not participating in Christmas culture, so you must engage in the consumerism or you will be socially punished
• the very nature of this type of toxic consumerist gift exchange is that people will spend money that they wouldn’t have spent otherwise, and then receive gifts of roughly equal value (and these gifts are almost always things that they would not have bough for themselves). so the end result is that people spend money in order to get corporate products that they don’t need and likely don’t want either. the only ones who win in this situation are the corporations

of course all of this toxic holiday culture was created by - and is actively maintained by - corporate marketing behemoths that do everything in their power to broadcast “it’s going to be fucking Christmas soon!! buy buy shop faster buy buy buy!!” in every way possible at once (this is why Christmas music is fucking inescapable for 45+ days before Christmas)

people think the Japanese KFC thing is funny but Americans are so much more brainwashed than that and it can be viscerally upsetting to me

all this to say: I fucking hate Christmas and I hate having it shoved down my throat every year. I hate the music, I hate the decorations, I hate the Salvation Army, I hate being confronted by Christianity even more than usual, and most of all I hate being forced to buy and receive gifts every single year

@kasdeya the whole thing is painful. I've alleviated it a little with wishlists, which I give to the Christmas lovers in my life. I also make it very clear that anything not on the list is unwanted and will be returned, and the list makes clear whether substitutes are acceptable. But all that extra work to make the list, communicate clearly, set boundaries, and also regularly find things I want and could buy, and then not buy them and put them on a list where I might not get them, just to make a shitty holiday not pleastant, but bearable, is a great example of how awful the Christmas experience is on a fundamental level. Not to mention that these alleviation steps aren't even universally accessible for executive function and social conflict reasons.