Counter-Currents
Holiday Special
It’s Time to STOP Shopping for Christmas
Greg Johnson
1,053 words
Even though I am an unbeliever, the Christmas season is my favorite time of the year. Christmas, like dogs, brings out the best in people. It awakens a desire to beautify one’s world and adorn one’s soul with good deeds.
The worst kind of evil is not merely harming people, but harming people by exploiting their goodness. A pickpocket merely steals your money. A con artist who steals your money by saying that he is collecting donations for a good cause also penalizes virtue and undermines the trust that is the foundation of civilized society.
That is why I despise the commercialization of Christmas. There is a whole economy of “fourth quarter” industries that depend on Christmas giving. Advertisers whip us into materialistic frenzies, so we rack up huge credit card debts. Traditionally, Christmas shopping begins after Thanksgiving. But recently, it has been creeping back toward Halloween. If capitalists had their way, of course, we would be listening to Christmas muzak and pushing shopping carts in midsummer.
But there is a limit to when Christmas shopping can begin. If religion had anything to do with it, the absolute limit would be Easter. But economics is the deciding factor here. And in economic terms, Christmas shopping cannot begin until consumers have paid off their credit card debts from the previous Christmas.
The Friday after Thanksgiving is now called “Black Friday.” Traditionally, a Black Friday marks a massacre or disaster, and for consumers, I suppose it is. Merchants may be in the black, but consumers end up in the red.
It is too soon for White Nationalist politics in the United States. But racially conscious people still want to “do something.” The best thing we can do is make ourselves strong as a community. And the best way to do that is to become as independent as possible from the existing political and economic system. The Christmas season is the best time to begin that process, because it is the time when we spend the most money on the dumbest things in the dumbest way in the least amount of time.
So it is time to STOP shopping for Christmas.
Take a holiday from holiday shopping.
Stop running yourself ragged running up debts.
1. Don’t go into debt. Freeze your credit cards. Literally. Go to the kitchen, fill a container with water, put your credit cards in it, and stick it in the freezer. Don’t even think about thawing them out until January. And when January comes, resist the temptation and see just how long you can go without them.
2. Give the gift of freedom. Make a list of the people with whom you exchange gifts. If you have enough ties, enough sweaters, enough useless “novelty” items and your friends do as well, call them up and propose that you let one another off the hook.
3. Regift. Admit it, the thought has crossed your mind. I have done it countless times, usually with sweaters. A lot of people buy gifts just to buy gifts. What are the chances that they know you well enough and have the time and the taste to find you the perfect gift? This means that the first time around, many gifts do not reach the right recipient and end up unappreciated. Regifting is a way of helping them find the right home, at no additional cost and with the added benefit of reducing clutter. I start thinking about regifting well in advance (on Christmas day, truth be told), whereas many people choose gifts at the last minute.
4. Create, Reuse, Refurbish. Can you make your own Christmas cards, wreaths, and ornaments? Do it. Were your garden and fruit trees unusually productive? Consider giving preserves or pies for Christmas. If you have a particular talent for making bread or brewing beer or bottling wine, give those for Christmas. Old furniture is usually better made than new stuff. Learn to refinish and reupholster. Do you bind books? Offer to rebind a friend’s favorite book. Do you sew, knit, crochet? Make something. Between now and Christmas, you have plenty of time to do any of these things. You even have time to pick up new skills.
5. Teach, Encourage, Empower. Do you have talents and skills you can teach your friends? Give them “gift certificates” (hand-made, of course) entitling them to lessons. Do you play the piano? Offer the children of your friends some introductory lessons. Do you know how to maintain and repair your car, your air conditioner, your bicycle, your appliances, your plumbing, your lawn mower? Well most of your friends don’t. They spend hundreds of dollars every year repairing or replacing items that they have not maintained properly. Give them lessons, and you will help them save money and become more independent. Are you a great cook? Give your friends cooking lessons. People spend enormous amounts of money eating out. When they can make better food cheaper at home, they will not need or want to.
If you still have gifts to give after running through the above list and you are compelled to go shopping, consider the following rules of thumb.
6. Buy from local, small businesses, not big chains.
7. Buy goods made by white people around the world, not non-whites.
8. Patronize artists and craftsmen, not mass producers of plastic junk.
9. Keep your money in the racially conscious community. Buy from racially conscious publishers, booksellers, and other merchandisers. Readers, please post links to racially-conscious merchandisers in the comments to this article.
10. Affiliate Marketing: If you buy from Amazon.com, enter through Counter-Currents and we will get a commission at no cost to you. (If you have Amazon.com already bookmarked on your computer, replace your old bookmark with the url in the link above, and Counter-Currents will still get a commission, even if you do not enter Amazon.com from this site.)
No, I am not Scrooge. I am not the Grinch. I am not trying to steal your Christmas. I am merely suggesting that we celebrate Christmas intelligently and creatively, in ways that enrich us as a community rather than impoverish us, in ways that empower rather than weaken us. Decommercializing Christmas and reconnecting it with family and community will actually make it more meaningful and fun than ever.
Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas from everyone at Counter-Currents/North American New Right!
21 comments
Very creative Greg. Some of the Christians I know have woken up and often lament the commercialization of their most important holiday but haven’t really figured out how to combat the process. This is a Christmas gift in and of itself.
“It is too soon for White Nationalist politics in the United States. But racially conscious people still want to “do something.”
. . .
Readers, please post links to racially-conscious merchandisers in the comments to this article.”
Greg, no offence, but these two statements are barely reconcilable, for if we were at the stage where any significant merchandisers would want their businesses linked to our ‘unspeakable’ movement, we WOULD be at the stage where White Nationalist politics would not be too soon. Beyond the few explicitly white music labels and book publishers, already known or easily found on-line by anyone who would find their way to this site, there is very little, though there are some Odinist objet d’arts from some websites that might interest a subset of readers, and related movements may have similar offerings.
Better at this time for most would be to take the implicit approach, along the lines of ‘implicit freedom of association’ (eg if you wish your cafe to be free of all but the most cultured blacks, play non-stop J.S. Bach etc at a decent volume). Classical music recordings, Wagner DVD’s, books of Kipling and a thousand more of our pre-PC white writers, reproductions of detailed paintings of Austrian village scenes, etc, etc, etc.
All of this, indeed all our great heritage prior to the cataclysm of 1914, is appropriate.
Let’s see what people come up with, shall we?
Another good practice is to unwrap presents carefully and save the wrapping paper for future re-use. It’s not so much the pennies but the principle: If your spouse has carefully chosen great-looking paper, it makes no sense to then rip it all up and throw it all away after just one use and then keep wiping out half the forests in Finland each time there is a birthday or a Christmas. We’ve been using the same wrapping paper for all occasions since 2007.
Yes Alex, this makes good sense. My wife and have done this since our kids were babies, and I got the habit from my grandparents; Christmas at my grandmother’s featured some beautifully wrapped and decorated presents, but my grandparents were also quite thrifty, so it made no sense to just burn all the wrappings. With today’s throwaway junk from China, most wrapping is thin and cheap, but good stuff, which is more expensive, is worth saving and re-using.
But a word of warning, Alex. You never know where this can lead. From such minor beginnings I’ve become an almost pathological hoarder, with piles of stuff in and around my office, my apartment, my farmhouse, my workshop, my barn, my hayloft and my stable, though it’s all in the good cause of theoretical re-use. But the bigger problem is that I’m also pretty much one of your constipated old fascists and I feel the two traits are linked.
Greg, in the spirit of your article, here is a link to a specific Odinist craftshop:
https://wodanesdag.com/pp-cat2.html
And here is a page listing a few more:
http://www.asatru.org/links.php
I’m not an Odinist, nor a member of any pagan revival movement, but I do find that it is around Yule, more than any time of year, when my thoughts turn most to our older traditions, the relative superiority of paganism, and then to the real challenge that faces whites: how to synthesize a meaningful replacement for dying, Semitic, Christianity, the various, essentially dead, Indo-European Paganisms it replaced, and the truthful, but morally conflicted, Darwinism that must point the way to any realistic future.
Edward Toynbee had only foolish, Christian revivalist notions of how to overcome this problem, but he did at least frame it correctly when he wrote: “Religion is the serious business of mankind.”
I love the idea of saving wrapping paper!
One thing I have been doing for YEARS is using gift bags/wrapping paper made out of Christmasy material. I went and got some cute fabric and sewed a veriety of sizes. Then I use ribbon to tie the bag shut. Every year when I unpack my decorations I also unpack those gift bags. They have become as sentimental as my treasured ornaments and its a great way to not have to buy paper every year!
My Other-Half and I have been using the same Christmas/Holiday bags for years now! Picked them us cheap back when, added perhaps a few along the way…and have been re-using these items year after year for at least a decade now. We do a modest Holiday celebration anyway, so it all works seemlessly really.
I very much like Greg’s idea of patronizing WN or similar businesses. Curiously, though I only read this article today, I had given the little-woman my annual “wish list” just a day or two ago…and nearly all of it was from a WN-friendly establishment, or at least a small, survival-oriented business, etc. Glad to see we are all thinking these same thoughts!
Let’s see pictures of frozen credit cards too. My wife paid all of hers off and cut them up last year.
Regifting, the way it’s usually done, makes my toes curl. If I receive something that is unsuitable for me, I will give it to someone on no special occasion in particular, telling them that I received it for Christmas but it’s not right for me and if they could use it, they can have it. But to pass on a gift pretending you bought it specifically as a Christmas gift for that particular person is, well, pretty sad.
There’s horror stories regarding regifts, too, where spoiled people get so many presents that they forget who it came from when they regift and they end up “giving” it to the person that they got it from in the first place the previous Christmas. Also, in extended families, sooner or later someone will run into a relative wearing his rejected gift. That is a stab through the heart.
The best way to regift is to be completely upfront about it.
And thank you for saying so.
Here are some racially conscious publishers and booksellers:
http://www.arktos.com/
http://www.barnesreview.org/
http://www.noontidepress.com/
http://www.ety.com/HRP/
http://ninebandedbooks.com/
http://www.natvanbooks.com/
http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/index.php
http://www.radicaltraditionalist.com/titles.htm
http://dominionpress.net/
Please feel free to add others.
http://www.arminius.se/
http://www.stevenbooks.co.uk/
This is a good find. Thanks!
Great comments GP! Also thanks for the list of links Greg. There were several on the list of which I was unaware.
http://www.wermodandwermod.com/index.html
I would like to encourage White parents to purchase The Box of Delights (DVD), for their children to watch over the Yuletide period. Adults will also enjoy The Box of Delights. It can be bought from Amazon, and the complete series can be found on YouTube. There are NO non-Whites in it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUkOsMSN7PI
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Box-Delights-DVD-Devin-Stanfield/dp/B00067IEGY
Great article Greg!
Here are some more suggestions:
My fiance and I have set a limit on how much we will spend for each other. No more than $100, with no pressure on reaching the limit.
Give each other meaningful gifts that help create family unity, such as:
-vouchers for massages
-watching a type of movie you normally don’t like with the other person (or going somewhere like a museum, etc. that you don’t normally like to do)
-anything that includes you spending time with whoever it might be, doing something THEY enjoy
As far as gift ideas, if anyone asks you what you want, suggest good books you want to read (arktos.com is great because it is not very explicit, so you send non-racially aware people there), OR things that will help our movement out in the long run:
-video editing software
-picture editing software
-video/picture editing tools
-anything that encourages you to better yourself…some things I can think of would include gym membership/discount (though anyone with experience in working out knows you can do everything you need at home), public speaking classes, video/picture editing classes, foreign language tutoring classes (maybe the first lesson or two free, in order to get you started).
If you can speak a foreign language, please offer to help other racially aware people learn (or mention it is something you wish you could do to someone who does)! It is in our best interest to be educated! Not to mention the networking opportunities it offers. BTW, you can tutor someone in another language over Skype for free.
Well, that’s all I can think of off hand. I will comment if I remember something later.
And remember, DISCOURAGE other whites from engaging in the disgusting commercialization of Christmas! Consider it your duty to bring it up in conversation (naturally of course).
Thankfully in my case, my fiance and I were able to set a precedent and tradition of making Christmas time about family before the little ones start coming. Our theory is if we give in once and go “all out” or even more than the previous year it will be a “slippery slope.” So I guess my point is: make a plan and stick to it!
These are great suggestions. That’s that spririt!
Please consider a purchase from Western Voices web store.
http://www.westernvoices.com/
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