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    Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case For A More Joyful Christmas
    Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case For A More Joyful Christmas
    Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case For A More Joyful Christmas
    Ebook70 pages56 minutes

    Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case For A More Joyful Christmas

    By Bill McKibben

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Too many people have come to dread the approach of the holidays, a season that should -- and can -- be the most relaxed, intimate, joyful, and spiritual time of the year. In this book, Bill McKibben offers some suggestions on how to rethink Christmastime, so that our current obsession with present-buying becomes less important than the dozens of other possible traditions and celebrations.

    Working through their local churches, McKibben and his colleagues found that people were hungry for a more joyful Christmas season. For many, trying to limit the amount of money they spent at Christmas to about a hundred dollars per family, was a real spur to their creativity -- and a real anchor against the relentless onslaught of commercials and catalogs that try to say Christmas is only Christmas if it comes from a store.

    McKibben shows how the store-bought Christmas developed and how out of tune it is with our current lives, when we're really eager for family fellowship for community involvement, for contact with the natural world, and also for the blessed silence and peace that the season should offer. McKibben shows us how to return to a simpler and more enjoyable holiday.

    Christmas is too wonderful a celebration to give up on, too precious a time simply to repeat the same empty gestures from year to year. This book will serve as a road map to a Christmas far more joyful than the ones you've known in the past.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateJun 25, 2013
    ISBN9781439142554
    Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case For A More Joyful Christmas
    Author

    Bill McKibben

    Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature (1989), the first book on the climate crisis written for a general audience, and his work appears regularly in many periodicals, from The New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He founded 350.org, the first grassroots global climate-change awareness campaign, and, more recently, Third Act, organizing for progressive action with people over age sixty. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. His newest book, forthcoming in 2022 from Macmillan, is The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.

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    Reviews for Hundred Dollar Holiday

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      A great little history of Christmas celebrations, along with some healthy suggestions on how to "reclaim" it from the corporations and find some true pleasure in the season and, yes, maybe even peace.
    • 4/5
      A very quick read that provided a handful of amazing stats and facts about how Christmas has become the consumption machine that it is. Great way to change perspective on making the holidays more joyful and reverent. Will certainly be thinking from now through the rest of the year on how to implement some of these ideas and create the holiday I want - not the one we are told to have.
    • 2/5
      -- It's a coincidence I finished reading HUNDRED DOLLAR HOLIDAY by Bill McKibben in December. In the small book McKibben writes about history of Christmas, value of spending time with loved ones not money, & handmade gifts. On December 25 McKibben feeds birds. Neighbors receive cookies & carols. There aren't many new ideas in HUNDRED DOLLAR HOLIDAY but the book clad in brown paper is interesting. --
    • 3/5
      A great little history of Christmas celebrations, along with some healthy suggestions on how to "reclaim" it from the corporations and find some true pleasure in the season and, yes, maybe even peace.

    Book preview

    Hundred Dollar Holiday - Bill McKibben

    INTRODUCTION

    Who Stole Christmas?

    I’VE BEEN CALLED MY SHARE of names, but the only one that ever really stung was grinch. The year that a few friends and I started the Hundred Dollar Holiday program through our rural Methodist churches, several business-page columnists in the local papers leveled the G-word—we were dour do-gooders, they said, bent on taking the joy out of Christmas. And, frankly, their charges sounded plausible enough. After all, we were asking our families, our friends, and our church brethren to try and limit the amount of money they spend on the holiday to a hundred dollars—to celebrate the holiday with a seventh or an eighth of the normal American materialism. There’s no question that would mean fewer Pop guns! And bicycles! Roller skates! Drums! Checkerboards! Tricycles! Popcorn! And plums! Not to mention Playstations, Camcorders, Five Irons, and various Obsessions. Perhaps my heart was two sizes too small.

    So it was with some trepidation that I carefully reread my daughter’s well-worn copy of the Seuss classic, neatly shelved with Green Eggs and Ham, Horton Hears a Who, and all the other secular parables. There on the cover was the Grinch himself, red eyes gleaming malevolently as he plotted the sack of Whoville. He hated the noise of the kids with their toys, and he hated the feast of rare Who-roast-beast, and most of all he hated the singing. Why, for fifty-three years I’ve put up with it now! I MUST stop this Christmas from coming! . . . But HOW? Simple enough, of course. All he had to do was loot the town of its packages, tinsel, trees, food, even the logs in the fireplace. Even the crumbs for the mice disappeared back up the chimney.

    But of course it didn’t work. That Christmas morning, listening from his aerie for the wailing from Whoville below, the Grinch heard instead the sound of singing. Christmas had come. It came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes, or bags! After puzzling three hours till his puzzler was sore, the Grinch was forced to conclude that Christmas came from no store.

    And so I breathed a sigh of real relief. Not only was I not a grinch trying to wreck the meaning of Christmas, it was abundantly clear who the grinches of our culture really are: those relentless commercial forces who have spent more than a century trying to convince us that Christmas does come from a store, or a catalogue, or a virtual mall on the Internet. Every day, but especially in the fall, they try their hardest to turn each Cindy Lou Who into a proper American consumer—try their best to make sure her Christmas revolves around Sony or Sega, Barbie or Elmo.

    But Dr. Seuss’s message went deeper for me. You see, when we’d begun thinking about Hundred Dollar Holidays, it was mostly out of concern for the environment or for poor people. Think of all that wrapping paper, we said, all those batteries, all that plastic. Think of all those needy people who could be helped if we donated our money to them instead. Think of all those families who went deep into debt trying to have a proper Christmas.

    All those issues are important, and I’ve spent much of my life writing about and working on them. But the more we progressed on our little campaign, traveling around our region having evening meetings at small rural churches like the one I attend, the more we came to understand why people were responding—indeed, why we had responded to the idea. It wasn’t because we wanted a simpler Christmas at all. It was because we wanted a more joyous Christmas. We were feeling cheated—as if the season didn’t bring with it the happiness we wanted. We were Christians, and we felt that the story of the birth of this small baby who would become our Savior, a story that should be full of giddy joy, could hardly break through to our hearts amid all the rush and fuss of the season. And many of our friends, Christian or not, felt that too much of the chance for family togetherness was being robbed by the pressures of Christmas busyness and the tensions of gift-giving.

    Christmas had become something to endure at least as much as it had become something to enjoy—something to dread at least as much as something to look forward to. Instead of an island of peace amid a busy life, it was an island of bustle. The people we were talking to wanted so much more out of Christmas: more music, more companionship, more contemplation, more time outdoors, more love. And they realized

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