Holiday Spending in America

Over time, holidays have contracted more than a spiritual or patriotic meaning. Major holidays aren’t just holidays anymore, they’re events. Family events, social events, events in which everyone is trying to outdo one another. Obviously, coming together with your friends and family is a sentimental time, but there is also a lot of pressure to be remembered for some sort of holiday presentation. In 2010, Americans spent 135.16 billion on Christmas, 30.50 billion on thanksgiving, and 17.60 billion on valentines day. That’s a boatload of money that we’re putting into our holidays. and theres a lot of controversy to whether or not that’s a good thing. Anyways, back to the numbers.

Those figures include not only gifts but also food and parties related to holiday events. There is a huge drive in our culture to be the biggest and the best. Everyone wants to give the best presents (which by the way soak up 47.2% of holiday spending) or throw the best parties (which are another 36.2 percent). Life, whether it be families or friend groups or the entire world, is a popularity contest. And America knows damn well that popularity contests are expensive. Think of a beauty pageant: Those girls and women spend thousands of dollars on dresses and hair and cosmetic who-knows-what on an hour performance that they likely will not be remembered for. Holidays bring out a similar drive in people: spending hundreds on buying the most presents and throwing the biggest parties. Whoever comes out on top is a friend or family favorite and then what? That person has a free ride until someone else comes up and kicks them off their spot. It’s brutal, but it’ the truth. Holidays that were established for very meaningful events have become nothing more than commercialized monsters. People die on Black Friday.

On the other hand, some people aren’t as spiritual about their holidays. There are thousands that celebrate christmas without closely practicing the religions that created it. Some people don’t practice religion at all, Christmas is just a nice holiday. So why not indulge? If people want to spend however much on their holidays, so be it. I see no problem. Granted, yes, it is a little extreme, but we all have something that we get a little too excited about.

Losing it Over Summer Vacation

The school calendar itself is a challenge for some students. Losing huge amounts of what they learn throughout the course of the school year is a common problem for students to experience over their summer vacations. I do feel that the agricultural layout of our school calendar could use some revising, because we do have an educational gap over our summers. However... if programs are being offered in the summer to close that gap, then I don’t think we would need to reduce the time for summer break.

There are plenty of students that do perfectly fine over the summer and come back without missing a beat. Just as many fall way behind because they aren’t doing anything to keep that information with them. So if more summer programs were offered (and maybe mandated depending on the academic performance of the student) then more students would be up to speed when they come back and not have to worry about falling behind. Of course, the other option is reducing or even eliminating summer vacation.

The current layout of the school year is outdated. It was designed for students that had to help their parents with their crops and livestock over the summer, which is nowhere near as common. Especially in city settings, where it is borderline unheard of. So if the layout of the school year was spread out over more of the calendar year, then there wouldn’t be such a huge gap within which to lose all of what you lost last year. Maybe students could go to school for two weeks at a time and then have one week off inbetween. Or maybe whole months could be alternated. Maybe every other week. Who knows? Of course, this may also require some revision in the curriculum itself but that would have to be a series of trial and error to perfect.

So both options would be very beneficial, but if one comes into play, I don’t think the other would be necessary. If we have a shorter summer, then we won’t need to fill it with all of the same activities and programs to fill the gap. But at the same rate, if we have all of these educational programs filling out three month summers, then there would be no need to make our summers so short. So it could go either way, but both could be overkill. Students still need some free time.