This will be the second holiday season I spend working in retail. I work in a specialty gift shop, as most seem to desribe it, based off of a major cable network with several channels. This store in a mall in one of the largest, and richest, metropolis areas in one of the richest countries in the world.

It is amazing to me, as a practicing anthropologist, the idea of what is occurs every holiday season in this culture. It is simply one giant pot luck!

The wealth of the people and the country is redistributed from them back to the corporations, in an orgy of materialistic buying gifts for loved ones. What is even more startling is the fact that this ritual is considered largely secular in its current state of practice by the populance, with only small nods to any type of religious belief.

Let me take a step back with that last statement. Again, as a practicing anthropologist, I need to define such a heavily loaded word as reigious, or religion. Religion, in an anthropological definition, is any practice or ritual that a community practices to reinforce cultural meaning.

So when in reference to the holiday spending spree in this country that I state it is a largely secular practice versus a religious one, it is that the populance does not usually view the practice in how it serves to give the culture meaning. They usually view it in regards to economy or in the spending spree's relationship to its psuedo-Christian roots. I don't think I've ever heard anyone speak about how the holiday material worship actually works in a functional way to push the culture's mores and values within the people.

One of the great tenets of this country's culture is the idea of capitalism. But the subject of money and materialism itself is rarely, if ever, talked about as a good thing. So a large part of the country's cultural identity is treated as culturally taboo to speak and discuss, though it remains as a driving force in providing daily meaning in most of its citizens. And the holiday season is the lungs that breath life into the economy year after year.

My store makes enough money in the months of November and December to equal the rest of the year. Two months equal 10. That is amazing to me. But what is more amazing is how blindly our culture treats the phenomenon of spending.

But that is another thing I learned as a social philosopher. That what people say they do and why they do it almost always differs from what they do and the functional reasons for doing so.