What corporate America determines a holiday season to be is so familiar it has ceased to bewilder us anymore. Naturally, Halloween starts in August, Christmas in October and Valentine’s Day in late December. In the blink of an eye, entire aisles of stores turn orange, red and green or pink respectively, filled with charming holiday decor. During the prolonged Christmas season for example, many of these products are nothing more than a year-round product with a small snowflake plastered in the corner, or with the cuddly brand mascot sporting a red Santa hat and looking particularly cheery.
Then, when December 26 rolls around, these products, which were previously priced higher than the year-round merchandise suddenly, turn to common trash. Clearance aisles fill with an assortment of reds and greens for the next two months with prices slashed lower and lower until they’re finally tossed into the landfill. There’s no sense in saving them for October to roll around again. There’s no room in the overflowing warehouses already stocked for the next commercialized holiday season.
Somewhat ironically, in the Christian calendar Christmastide starts on Christmas and extends twelve days until Epiphany begins. Meanwhile, the season leading up to Christmas is Advent, a period of reflection and preparation for the birth of Jesus, not the period of loud advertisements. It speaks to the secular corporatization of a sacred holiday that the spirit of consumerism dictates Christmas in an entirely different time period than when it was intended, purely for the purpose of profits.
To see the absurdity of commercialized holidays in action, consider the phenomenon of “Holiday Blend” M&M’s. Red and green M&M’s can be sold for more than the original variety packs of M&M’s around Christmastime and marked down to half the original price the day after Christmas, before eventually disappearing from stores altogether. This is an absurdity and speaks to a larger problem with food waste and its ties to commercialism. According to Feeding America, 38% of all food in the United States goes uneaten or unsold. Again, that is thirty-eight percent. The era of food scarcity is over, replaced by a preposterous overproduction, and yet some still cannot access the abundance. Feeding America also reports that recent cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) have put six billion meals at risk for the people who need it most.
We have heard time and time again the advice on how to personally reduce food waste and invest in tupperware, but this masks the second part of that Feeding America statistic: unsold. In other words, food is sown, grown, harvested, processed and shipped, only to sit in a warehouse or store aisle until it inevitably rots. This is particularly insidious if this food has been artificially given some kind of holiday connotation that suddenly makes it worthless after a particular holiday. How can food be deemed “Christmas,” a day later be deemed “clearance” and a week later be deemed “worthless?” Step back from the normalization of this process for a moment, and consider its absurdity. Does the color of the food matter to a starving child? Does the presence of a Santa hat on the mascot deem the food unconsumable to the malnourished?
As an aside, it is not just food waste that becomes a problem during holiday seasons. The US Ecology Center reports a 25% rise in waste sent to landfills between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. The wrapping paper, the Five Below trinkets designed to break after a week and everything in between ends up in landfills, prompting us to rethink how we celebrate holidays more broadly. As an adage I frequently think of goes, “There is no such thing as ‘away.’” Just because we don’t see our own waste does not mean it does not exist. Ask the folks living next to landfills and they will tell you waste does not just disappear.
We decry the absurdity of American commercialism and overconsumption, but consumers are not the ones who desire this. What is argued above is that although the topic of food waste during holiday seasons has been observed to death from an individual consumer perspective, there is much less attention given to the corporations deciding for the rest of us that Christmas starts in October and ends on December 26. We, the consumers, are not the forces who determine how much “seasonal food” gets produced and then discarded.
One could conceivably argue that corporations will learn to produce less due to losing profits as the consumer base cannot keep up with the supply, and demand drops. The flaw in this thinking is believing it costs the corporation much money at all to churn out low-quality, shoddily-made holiday themed foods and trinkets. I’m not an economist, and I don’t pretend to be, but it seems to me supply and demand lose their importance if the supply costs virtually nothing to produce and there are no monetary consequences to chucking what is not sold. True, we encourage production by our consumption, but the sheer quantity of red and greens on clearance and eventually in landfills every January points to the fact that production, not consumption, is the true culprit.
While I agree seasonal overconsumption from individual consumers is a problem and speaks to the larger American ideals of consumerism, I would argue seasonal overproduction may be the more pressing matter. If overproduction were solved, overconsumption would naturally decrease. Seasonal overproduction and the commercialization of our most beloved holidays is an absurd phenomenon that leads to fuller landfills and wasted holiday-themed food, all while hunger remains a pertinent problem.
Now that you are aware of this absurdity, look at holiday aisles in big box stores with a new set of eyes. How much will actually get purchased? How much will go on clearance? How much will go in the landfill? This is a complex problem that doesn’t have a clear call to action, but cultivating an awareness and exposing what we have come to take for granted is an important step in deconstructing its hold on our culture. A small step in the right direction are the corporations that have dedicated to donating, rather than throwing away, food that can no longer be sold for any reason. Our job as consumers is to continue to pressure corporations to make choices that lead to flourishing for everyone.
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