A point I forgot to mention in my last post (partially because it occurred to me after I clicked “publish”) is that while yes, we in the US are getting sick of the same old saccharine nonsense for the holiday season, the only way the culture seems to know how to express that feeling is through consumption. In Sweden, the tomte sets up shop at a farmhouse all year round, but gets a day off around Christmas time, with a meal supplied by the family. In the US, they’re treated like a Christmas-themed decoration, like Elf on the Shelf in a different coat of paint. (One day I might get to Elf on the Shelf…) Alpine demon Krampus, who follows St. Nicolas around and works with/under the Saint, punishing bad kids so Nick doesn’t get his hands dirty. In the US, his chicanery is moved to Christmas and used to sell movie tickets. (Krampus is a yearly rewatch for me, strictly on Dec. 5th (Krampusnacht), but the action is set around Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.)

Christmas overall is a consumerist nightmare, with untold costs between Black Friday and Boxing Day that better folks than me have been able to enumerate and articulate. And white America especially is absolutely no stranger to sticking price tags on cultural artifacts from anywhere else within reach (ask just about any minority group in the country, cultural appropriation is NOT a new discussion).

However, I personally have found it telling that about the same time the pagan types are talking about what some call “The Storm” (this guy has a whole series of posts on the topic and they’re all great, including one about the tides of magic), we start seeing these things in specific. The Tomten, the Krampus movies, and it seems to me, it’s easier and easier to find books and articles about Yuletide traditions elsewhere (it’s the same ones, too, as if they’re being sold to the uninformed consumer like so many Wicca 101 books). And we just slapped a price tag on it all.