When the season’s ho-ho-ho becomes hoard-hoard-hoard

Stuff. Things. Gadgets.

They come in the shape of computers, cellphones, television sets and electronic games. They’re shirts and jackets and ties and sweaters. They’re watches, rings, bracelets and necklaces.

We arrive early at Fry’s, Best Buy, Circuit City and Radio Shack to get the latest beeping thingamajig before it’s gone.

We haunt the Westside Pavilion and the Glendale Galleria and the Northridge Fashion Center malls, lured by the plaintive wail of stuff that almost screams from the crowded shelves, “Take me! Buy me! Love me!”

To paraphrase one Pastor Bill in cyberspace, there’s Jesus for real Christians this holiday season, for everyone else there’s MasterCard, Visa, American Express.

We swarm like cockroaches from one mall to the next and then to the next, credit cards at the ready, feeding on the crumbs that advertisers scatter along the route. And I’m feeling guilty about it.

I watch television scenes of 2,000 families lined up outside a skid row mission to get toys for their kids, as I add stacks of presents to the pile under our family Christmas tree.

I hear of food banks operating at full tilt to get food to the hungry, and I jam my shopping cart full of meat and wine at supermarkets that gleam with culinary enticements.

I buy stuff and things and gadgets with impunity, knowing that I can afford them, but also knowing I don’t really need them. I dump the old thing, whether it’s working or not, and replace it with something newer and shinier.

I know, in a way, why I do this. It’s obsessive-compulsive behavior rooted in the period of my childhood when we had no Christmas and there was no food. Can anyone imagine Thanksgiving without a turkey? I can. Christmas without a tree? Many times.

So to make up for all that, I subconsciously pack enough food in the house to feed a platoon. Bags of staples like rice and pasta and beans. Jars of peanut butter, jellies and mustard. Cans of tuna, mixed vegetables and hearts of palm.

Our pantry is full. When I go shopping, my wife says, “Just buy what’s on the list, Elmer. Nothing more. You understand that?”

“Uh-huh.”

But then I come home with this and with that and with something else that wasn’t on the list, like roast beef hash, of which I have many containers, and cans of Spam, the purchase of which must put me on some lower strata of society. No one willingly eats Spam. I am a Spam collector.

The other reason I am so inclined to buy, especially gadgets, is because of the glut of advertising that fills our lives. In this age of Donald Trump, one of the least admirable men in America, and surely one of the funniest looking, the Lords of Commerce reign supreme. They toll the Christmas hour.

A PBS “Frontline” show called “The Persuaders” addresses what commentator-reporter Douglas Rushkoff calls “a clutter crisis.” As he drives and walks through Manhattan by day and by night, the very environment defines what the crisis is. It’s the immensity of advertising. Neon lights that flash and twinkle. Billboards that dominate Midtown. Ads that flash like photographs on the sides of tall buildings.

Beyond all that, there are ads on T-shirts, toys, cars, sports equipment, and in utility bills, on computers, on television, over the radio, jamming the print media, filling our mailboxes.

We’re not people. We’re customers. We’re occupants. We’re buyers. We’re cockroaches.

It’s a multibillion-dollar industry, Rushkoff says. “It’s everywhere you look ... a tinkling membrane of commercial messages.” An economist says of the advertising giants, “They don’t want to diffuse the atmosphere, they want to become the atmosphere.”

We live in a nation of excess. Our desire to obtain and to own, to make more money than we need, to live beyond a level that is required, to gather ... stuff ... is an element of greed that is fast becoming the nature of a free-market society.

In actuality, we’re more than the stuff we buy. We’re a nation of caring, freedom-loving people. But the world sees us as greedy, grasping materialists. Whatever turned our image downward? Why did we let it happen?

It isn’t just Donald Trump and his projection of mindless wealth. It’s us too, the cockroaches, absorbing like dumb insects what the advertisers tell us we need in order to be fashionable, to be prettier, to be current, to be, God help us, hip.

I stand by our Christmas tree this silent season, staring. I’m not even quite sure what I bought. I keep a list with numbers that correlate with the packages, so I’ll know what’s in them.

Christmas has become a holiday of merchandising. Business on every level prevails. Advertisers are the shock troops who seek the hearts and souls of the cockroaches, turning them toward counters piled high with what?

Stuff. Things. Gadgets.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at al.martinez@latimes.com.