by Freida Marie Crump
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Greetings from the Ridge.
Struggling my way through a big box store this week and finally making it to the checkout lane, I had an epiphany. I swear it was a miracle. Maybe I was just woozy from walking through the perfume aisle, but I genuinely think I was visited by some sort of strange aura… a heavenly text message.
As we try to simultaneously struggle with the two-headed monsters of the holiday season and the state of the world, why not kill two birds with one brick? It hit me! Sell Christmas to the government of China!
No, no, don’t write me off as an over-eggnog-ed lunatic… yet. Hear me out. Christmas is the single biggest economic factor in the consumer year, our trade balance with China is way out of whack, and most of our goods are manufactured in Asia anyway, so why not sell the whole season to the Chinese? They make the plastic duck, ship it to us, we Christmas-ize it and send it back at a profit.
It’s still the dream of most in the eastern half of the world to live a lifestyle similar to those in the West, so let’s just bundle the entire idea of Christmas up and sell it off to the only nation that can afford it: China.
Of course it’ll take a bit of preparation. Anyone who’s tried to sell a house in the recent shaky markets knows that you’ve got to do a bit to spiff things up before putting your product on the market. Savvy home-sellers in large markets hire experts to re-do the place… giving it what they call "curb appeal."
A few of my suggestions on preparing to "flip" Christmas:
Work on the music. Edit out songs like "White Christmas" and "I’ll Be Home for Christmas," two numbers that’d depress a hyena. And totally chuck "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire," surely one of the most gloomy and dismal ballads ever written.
Cut the sugar out of Christmas. Eating sugar kills brains cells. Okay, I made that up, but other than credit card debt it has the most lingering affect after the Christmas season is over.
Delete the idea of Christmas cards. Winston Churchill once looked at a Christmas card and said, "Never has so much been spent by so many on something read by so few." I made that one up, too, but by the time you translate it into Standard Mandarin, it’ll read well enough to be a selling point. After all, we want to be able to tout our product as The New and Improved Christmas.
Snow? Has to go. It’s a bother and the Chinese already have enough.
Moving onward with our "Fix and Flip the Yuletide" plan, we need to give Santa Claus a makeover. The jolly old elf has been scaring the Christmas pudding out of little ones since his inception, and the specter of a 300-pound bearded Caucasian ho-ho-ho-ing his way into Ho-Pin Tung City would surely cause the Chinese children to send the portly westerner packing. Maybe a 40-something well-groomed diplomat with an MBA from Yale… a gregarious fellow who looks like everyone’s favorite uncle and knows how to work an IPod. And forget the elves… just too creepy.
Keep the traditional Christmas colors of red and green. The idea of a "Red Christmas" would surely appeal to China’s ruling authorities and in recent years they’ve fallen in love with all the holly-colored currency we’ve sent their way.
Any real estate agent knows that you should highlight a property’s strengths… promote the view from the back porch and maybe they’ll overlook the sump pump in the basement. With that in mind, we need to push the concept of Christmas trees. Fourteen percent of China is covered with forests and the majority of those are coniferous. The country as over 115,000 forest farms and 131 governmental bureaus dedicated solely to the care of what will become their new national symbol: The Chinese Christmas Tree. It’s a no-brainer. Forget the eggnog and push the tree.
Of course if we were to actually flip then sell off all the trappings, trimmings, and trivialities of Christmas, then all we’d have left would be a simple celebration of a child born in poverty who went on to do some pretty remarkable things… and that wouldn’t be any fun, would it?
You ever in Poosey, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.