Gluttony as Gratitude

There is something so unappealing about the holidays. Maybe it's because I'm single and need to get knocked up pretty soon here. Or maybe it's because my family is broken, emotionally and geographically. Or maybe it has something to do with my dissatisfaction with the myriad ways the holiday spirit has been co-opted and commodified into one slick sell. As soon as you've soiled your Halloween costume with a mixture of high fructose corn syrup, dissolved milk solids, and a touch of very processed cocoa powder, the stores have changed their displays, their music. You can't even buy a new toothbrush to stave off imminent cavities from indulgence the night before without hearing a sorry rendition of your least favorite holiday song by your least favorite popular singer. Whatever and whoever that is for you, the store somehow knows. Something changed while you were sleeping. Thanksgiving and, more importantly, Christmas arrived.

So much for all of Tolle's hard work toward helping Oprah's nation witness the "power of now." There is no cultural allowance for it. Even those of us who haven't seen the inside of a church for fifteen years are suddenly encouraged to prepare for the birth of Christ by purchasing as adornment for our mantels and end tables useless trinkets made by tiny or tired or both tiny and tired Third World hands. We must somehow find, out of the pittance left to us in our jobless recovery after our rather extravagant, albeit forced gift of $700 billion to the banks last year, the money to buy lots of food, decorations, and presents. Otherwise the people we love most would finally realize their worst suspicions were correct all along: you never truly loved them. Otherwise you would have forgone extraneous expenditures like clean, healthy food or that new water filter you've been meaning to get. Either that or you would have racked up more credit card debt, not to mention the stress attached to that debt plus the host of diseases tethered to that stress. Oh, your demonstrations of Love.

Our Thanksgiving food comas will present quite a challenge to our waking up early enough in order to score Christmas bargains the next day. But that's post-gorge. First you need to spend a small eternity in the kitchen, cooking away the few nutrients that our selenium-deficient produce has to offer, but that's okay because most of us weren't educated in the nutritional sciences, and, for most doctors practicing today, nutrition was an elective. Never mind that. However devoid of vitamins and trace minerals our banquet may be, ours is a feast nonetheless. We'll gorge ourselves because people who don't are wet blankets. Hey, who cares if caloric restriction is associated with better health and longevity? We'll show our gratitude for life by cutting it shorter. In fact, we'll gorge ourselves any day we want! We are so incredibly lucky not to be those faceless less fortunate others who are hoping for a small bowl of golden rice to avoid going blind that it's cause enough to celebrate, no?

Even without genetically engineered grain, most of us enjoy adequate beta carotene intake and are physically able to see, yet our vision is utterly myopic. We squander our privilege of seeing. We have not found, in all of our decadence, the willingness to extend our circle of compassion beyond ourselves, beyond our families, beyond our country, beyond our species. We do not yet see with global eyes. Or maybe, at some point, we lost the peripheral vision we once had. We have tacitly agreed to deal with the longer term only when it becomes disruptive, which it will, no doubt, because selfishness breeds more selfishness, and ultimately we are breaching contracts with ourselves and our humanity. For some reason, any reason, we cannot acknowledge this today. It's too heavy. We carry on, half-believing that big problems are best solved later.

I was chatting with my Scottish-born neighbor about the holidays. He is a live sound engineer and will be on a European tour in December. He laughed, "Christmas? Ha! In America?!? Your Christmas is in the mall."

I wonder what would happen if each of us could be freed of pretense for a few days or for more than a few days.

I wonder how many of you are thinking, "Sheesh, Margot. Where's your holiday spirit???"

Right now it's in hearing about people who won't be bulldozed by convention into unconscious behavior, like my friend's boyfriend's family, who, instead of indulging in gluttony and sloth on Thanksgiving, will be running a 7K together. That sounds exciting. I want to have a family like that.

For now, I'll try Gandhi's method of being the change I want to see. I'll have a healthy raw Thanksgiving, and I'll be sure to get some good exercise in, and that weekend, I'm starting the raw diva detox. It's free at

http://therawdivas.com

If anyone wants to join me, let me know. We can do it together. We can interact and blog and explore what it's like to live more simply for seven days. And don't forget: for purposes of this detox, boys can be divas, too.