by Addison Del Mastro | December 10, 2014

Two holiday seasons ago, I wrote about the 1996 film "Jingle All the Way," a corny Schwarzenegger comedy that pokes fun at the holiday shopping rush and the mayhem that often ensues. I noted that nearly every over-the-top depiction of craziness in the film - including shoppers pepper spraying each other and brawling in the aisles - has since actually occurred.

This year, I'd like to remember a much older and more obscure, yet perhaps more substantive critique of holiday commercialism. It's an incredibly prescient 1956 short story by the late science fiction writer Frederik Pohl titled "Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus."

This story is all-but-forgotten, perhaps because science fiction was not considered true literature in those years, or because it simply came too early: with memory of the Depression still looming in people's minds, few were ready to criticize consumerism. But the story is prophetic to the point of nearly being a description of today's commercialism, and it deserves a wide reading.

In a humorous segment that sets the story's tone, the main character, George, recites this brilliant re-imagining of "The Night Before Christmas" in an attempt to impress the family of a young woman he's trying to court (I've copied only part of it):

So much for the bedroom, so much for the bath,

So much for the kitchen, too little by half!

Come Westinghouse, Philco! Come Hotpoint, G.E.!

Come Sunbeam! Come Mixmaster! Come to the Tree!

And out of the shops, how they spring with a clatter,

The gifts and appliances words cannot flatter!

The robot dishwasher, the new Frigidaire,

The doll with the didy and curlable hair!

The electrified hairbrush, the black lingerie,

The full-color stereoscopic TV!

Come, Credit Department! Come, Personal Loan!

Come, Mortgage, come Christmas Club -"The poem ends when the woman's family has had enough.