Christmas Consumerism Hits Bottom : Skid Row: On the growing mercantile fringe, secondhand street decorations mock people to whom ‘warm wishes’ means a bowl of soup.
The line is longer tonight, and though the men wait in silence, there is a constant motion of arms and legs working up extra body heat to stave off the piercing cold. From somewhere down the street, an overloud tape blares the seasonal music so incongruous to this scene: “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, make the Yuletide bright.”
It is Christmas on Skid Row, but the mood is hardly Norman Rockwell as fingers and hands brittle with cold wrap themselves around bowls of hot soup.
Rather than stockings and mistletoe, it is bedrolls and plastic sheeting that are hung with care, not in anticipation of jolly old St. Nick, but of nasty weather. Soon the fragile plastic sheeting will be flapping in the wind and the grimy cardboard sucking water like an oversized dish sponge.
Overhead, as if in mockery of this pathetic scene, a shopworn tinsel Christmas tree winks in a flood of street-light glare, a reminder that halls are bedecked all over Los Angeles, but the residents of Fifth Street are not invited to the party.
By now, Christmas consumerism has become so commonplace in our culture that it no longer incites discussion, much less dissension. It is merely accepted as the driving (or sputtering) engine of the economy, without which nearly 60% of all retail trade simply would not happen. Here on Fifth Street, the glaring contrast between the abundance of superfluities and the lack of necessities in that economy stands out in sharp relief.
The filthy flophouses, blood banks, sleazy bars and day-labor hiring halls that once marked this as an unattractive but relatively vigorous workingmen’s neighborhood are gone. In their place are scores of tiny stalls and stores operated by immigrants selling a vast profusion of cheap toys and electronic products, produced by cheap labor in places like Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea.
The doorways are braced by burly security guards; behind them, the merchants peer out and scour the sidewalks with unblinking scrutiny.
Last year was the first time ever that the light poles on Fifth Street were hung with the commercial bunting of Christmas. The fuzzy candy canes and tinsel trees have the ragged look that mark them as refugees from some Chamber of Commerce rummage sale. But they nevertheless hail the kind of economic development that warms the hearts of mayors and civic leaders.
Eager holiday shoppers now invade the traditional enclave of the marginalized, heedless of the blanket-clad poor huddled in the alleys, intent only upon acquiring their Christmas quota of cheap gifts, half of which will end up on the trash heap before Easter.
The poet Wordsworth had an excellent observation about this welter of avarice when he wrote that in “getting and spending we lay waste our powers . . . Great God, I’d rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn.” Some would say that our consumerist Christmas is indeed a pagan ritual, not unlike the potlach, a winter festival celebrated by Pacific Northwest Indians in which the elders competed for rank and status in a contest of gift-giving.
But in reality, the authentic gift relationship is spiritual. As Andrew Krimbell wrote in a recent issue of Harper’s, it is a situation that “strengthens the bonds between people and members of a community. It brings out the best in us and goes far beyond the shallow relationships of the marketplace.”
Compulsive consumption is shattering those bonds; indeed, there are no bonds of community at all between the marketplace that has sprung up like a noxious mushroom on Fifth Street and the long-time residents who are no longer welcome even to sleep on its filthy curbs.
It is no accident that the first folks to receive the gift of Christmas were the ones who lived on the margins--the stable hands, the shepherds, the homeless, the weary travelers who could not afford a night’s decent lodging.
The authentic gift of Christmas cannot be purchased in Skid Row’s tawdry mercantile annex; nor, for that matter, is it available even among the glamorous shops of Rodeo Drive.
This precious gift can only be born in the midst of those who are still capable of wonder and surprise because they are not already satiated with non-essentials. Improbable as it may seem, Christmas can be found around a soup pot on Skid Row.
