Conspicuous consumption

There’s something terrifying about the holiday season. November, December, and January roll together into a melee of holidays that my international-student bankroll and I don’t really know how to deal with. Fall break, Thanksgiving, and quasi-Christmas are spent on this side of the world. A $2,000 plane flight across an ocean and a few continents later, I inevitably arrive at my second Christmas, winter break, and New Year’s. And those are just the holidays celebrated by the average Columbian. Later in January, I’ve also got my favorite holiday, Chinese Lunar New Year.

Sometimes it feels like all I do is spend money during the happiest time of the year. I know that I don’t necessarily have to: My consumption habits are entirely my own, and dollars aren’t the only way to show the people around me some love. But money does help.

Fall break comes at just the right juncture during the semester to send people screaming off campus to do something besides study for midterms—watch a play ($), have a nice dinner ($$), get on a bus and go somewhere ($$$), do anything ($$$$?). Thanksgiving potlucks before the actual holiday involve an endless outpouring of my wallet’s contents to the Westside cashiers. Then comes a further slashing open of my checking account when—stranded as only international students are—I find myself forking out for cross-country travel. Black Friday is a show of incoherent spending, and Macy’s is swamped with coupon-wavers and every online retailer suffering distributed denial of service attacks from trigger-happy kids with credit cards. Then there’s Christmas, which comes months before Christmas—every shop that can afford it will have, without fail, carols and Frank Sinatra piping out the subliminal message, “Spend, spend, spend!”

The same thing happens in Singapore when I head back toward the equator after the semester’s done. Somehow, it being 90 degrees and humid out doesn’t stop the local Starbucks from selling gallons of $5 gingerbread lattes. Then, after the ribbons have been ripped off, my people rouse themselves on Boxing Day to go surging through the subterranean guts of our endless malls in search of New Year’s Eve clothes. New Year’s Eve itself is another fiscal black hole: You must pay the cover charge for the club, champagne, and a meal or three to catch up with friends. Rest two weeks. Then arm up with souvenirs for Columbians and get on the plane back to New York City. By the time I’m allowed to crawl back to my desk, having done my yearly duty to the gods of aggregate demand, I’m glad to have nothing to do but read.

Perhaps this is the cynicism of someone who doesn’t have family nearby for the season. Maybe being able to go home for the holidays helps to blunt the edge of consumerism’s knife. But the fact of the matter is that family doesn’t really make it much better. The specter of gift-giving hangs over all of these holidays for me, not in the least because the one family-centric holiday that does matter to me is the one holiday I’ll never get to celebrate during my time at Columbia. The Chinese Lunar New Year happens some time during the spring semester, but no on-campus event can ever substitute for having family around.

It’s not that the Lunar New Year is devoid of the monetary connotations that make other holidays a little harrowing. It’s an annual injection of free income into the pockets of most Chinese kids. Older relatives give out red packets containing money to younger members of the family. If you want to look at it another way, red packets are really gift-giving in its most perfect form, being one of the only socially acceptable ways of giving cash.

At the end of the day, the Lunar New Year is as costly as any other holiday. Besides red packets, there are also decorations and snacks and new year’s clothes that you have to make ready. But there’s something about the reversal of the usual consumption process that makes it psychologically less wearisome. When you give money instead of goods, you never have to worry about the appropriateness of your contribution, or how it matches up to what everyone else is giving. Consumption becomes the receiver’s prerogative, not the giver’s. Shops ready themselves for post-celebration spending in much the same way that all retailers prepare for holiday gluts, but the hysteria of buying isn’t related to the holiday itself. You don’t buy because the new year’s around the corner—you spend because the new year’s come and gone, because you’ve already done the visitations and family dinners and ritualized distribution of red packets, and done them all without having had to worry about beating the crowd to the best deal. Delaying consumption till after the fact helps holiday spending stay out of sight and therefore out of mind, leaving only new year’s goodies and the spirit of the holiday on the table. I wonder if I could give red packets to friends at Columbia—maybe then they, too, would understand the value of spending after the holidays.

Po Linn Chia is a Columbia College junior majoring in East Asian languages and cultures. She is involved in CIRCA and the Global Recruitment Committee. Ever the Twain runs alternate Tuesdays.