C is for commercialism

MANILA, Philippines - Last week, British news site The Guardian published a piece entitled “In Manila, malls aren’t passé — they are the city itself,” the implication being that the Philippines models itself after an outdated image of America. The word that sticks out the most is “passé,” considering that mall expansion is still considered a sign of urban progress, when every newly arrived foreign store chain or restaurant supposedly signals another step towards our century-old quest of catching up with the West.

Colin Marshall of The Guardian writes: “That, perhaps, comes as more of a surprise than anything to westerners, coming as we do from places where big, fully enclosed shopping centers, many of which have already undergone demolition, have become symbols of the increasingly passé, automobile-bound and fear-driven Cold War era of urban planning.”

It’s always jarring to read about how jarring our way of life is to foreigners, like opening a wound that has hardened into a callus of normalcy. But their perspectives never stick. They easily dissolve into the ether as soon as we step out of the world of think pieces and into the numbing wasteland of our reality. Shopping malls dominate Pinoy urban lifestyle because there is barely anything else of value in our urban landscape. And right now, in the most expensive and commercial month of the year, shopping malls are everything.

If we really are the American copycats that we are perpetually profiled as (and we are), then Christmas is by far our best American impression. The lifeblood of Pinoy Christmas is the mall, that great lasting legacy of American colonialism, the belly of the holiday capitalism beast, the place where the metro’s best Christmas decorations are displayed, where people buy gifts and holiday meaning. To say that it perfectly captures the “spirit of Christmas” is not erroneous. It’s not even cynical. It’s just plainly accurate.

MOST MATERIALISTIC DAY

The most common complaint about Christmas was expressed perfectly by comedian Chris Rock in his Saturday Night Live monologue earlier this month: “I don’t know Jesus, but from what I’ve read, Jesus is the least materialistic person to ever roam the earth… and we turned his birthday to the most materialistic day of the year.” While he is mostly right, he is wrong about one thing: “we” didn’t turn Jesus’ birthday into the most materialistic day of the year; the Victorian English-speaking world did.

The contemporary world thinks it’s celebrating the Christmas of the Nativity, which is an observance that never really gained currency within early Christian communities and pretty much died after much Protestant and Puritan dissent during the 17th century. What we’re really celebrating is the Christmas revivalism of the 19th century, that of yule logs, Christmas trees, Saint Nicholas, ’Twas The Night Before Christmas, and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The modern idea of Christmas was created during the age of Industrial Capitalism. It’s always been materialistic. It always had very little to do with Jesus.

Our preponderance of malls may seem like a step backwards in the eyes of our western brethren, but it actually makes our Christmas closer to the authentic pagan commercialism of 19th century England and America. Here in Metro Manila, we’re doing our best to keep that Victorian Christmas spirit alive — extending mall hours, scheduling hourly Christmas light shows, and putting up Christmas bazaars in every nook and cranny imaginable. Simply put: we’re basically being ourselves.

Think about your earliest memory of Christmas. In all likelihood, it involved stockings and the wide-eyed anticipation of a bearded, obese, Caucasian man who somehow finds his way through your chimney-less house, clutching the gift that you “deserve” because you’ve been such a good kid. The Santa Claus experience is universal and largely uncontroversial. And yet, here we are, still wondering where all this sacrilegious commercialism comes from, as if the very idea of material gratification wasn’t ingrained in all of us during the earliest Decembers of our lives.

It’s not that Christmas is materialistic — it’s that we’re inherently materialistic. And by “we,” I mean the entire capitalist world, but particularly the 21st century Philippines. After all, what is Christmas if not a celebration of us and the year that we all just had? 2014 has been a big year for globalization in our country, with the arrival of H&M, Old Navy, Pull and Bear, Tim Ho Wan, Baskin Robbins, and around a half-dozen ramen franchises from Japan. This was the year of the mall. This has been the decade — nay, the century — of the mall. So, by all means, let’s celebrate Christmas by celebrating this so-called passé, yet invariably integral funhouse of our distorted American dream. We all “deserve” it.

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Tweet the author @ColonialMental.