THE REAL CHRISTMAS SPIRIT

By JEFF GREENFIELD

Back in the early 1960s my Sundays at the University of Wisconsin were enlivened by the radio broadcasts of William T. Evjue, founder and publisher of the Capital Times and an aging veteran of the Progressive Era. For me the most memorable of his fulminations came during the Christmas season, when he thundered against the crass commercialization perpetrated by fat-cat corporate greed--followed immediately by his observation that a subscription to the Capital Times would make a splendid holiday gift.

I regarded this instant transformation from preacher to pitchman as tainted by a touch of hypocrisy. But now I realize that Evjue was simply a man ahead of his times. Far from violating the holiday spirit, the annual orgy of consumption we so often deplore is in fact a great gift we give to our way of life.

Most of us, I know, see the current frenzy in a very different light. We hear that L.L. Bean, J. Crew and Victoria's Secret are all but drained of hiking boots, chamois shirts and silk tap pants; we read in the newspapers of waiting lists for $4,000 handbags and $75,000 automobiles. And from every TV set, newspaper and magazine the purveyors of the modern-day bazaar hawk every imaginable consumable, potable and disposable.

We see this, and we think, What a spectacle! What a corruption of the season! Why can't we abandon this frenzied exchange of the unneeded and the unaffordable? Why not give gifts of the spirit and the soul instead?

Perish the thought! Or, to be more precise, if that thought took root, what would perish would be America's economic health. To a remarkable extent, our mass prosperity rests upon a base of annual hysteria.

Imagine that the true spirit of the season infused our people. Imagine that the rush for the 64-bit sensation Spatterguts III dissipated, that the latest digital-audio-video-cellular phenomenon inflicted carpal-tunnel syndrome on shoppers as they whipped out credit cards. Our consumer-electronics industry took in $6.7 billion in sales last December--nearly 15% of its total sales. What would happen to the game designers, the assemblers, the shippers and the clerks in all those consumer-electronics stores? Unemployment, thank you very much.

No new bicycle or in-line skates or tennis racquet or putter for the loved one in your life? Say goodbye to the $2.9 billion in Christmas sales racked up by sporting goods and bike shops. Shun the glittering bauble? Jewelry stores sold $4.5 billion worth of glitter last December--more than 23% of their total. No more liquor, candy and the like? With retail stores making anywhere from 25% to 40% of annual profits during the holidays, a wholesale abandonment of gift buying would turn our retail shops into empty shells.

What of our part-time workers, students, homemakers and the underemployed, who find desperately needed jobs in the shops and post offices, making sure gadgets and bric-a-brac flow from one end of the country to the other? And--to be bluntly self-interested for a moment--if the mass media didn't have holiday advertising to turn to, many of our finest journalists would find themselves suddenly confronted with the real meaning of nonprofit.

So bemoan the corruption of the season if you must, but remember: that cubic zirconia ring isn't some needless trinket; it is a corpuscle in the bloodstream of a mighty economic engine. By the way, wouldn't a subscription to a lively, informative Weekly Newsmagazine make a splendid holiday offering?