When Did Christmas Become About Buying Things to Prove Love?

At what point did generosity start coming with a receipt, a credit card statement, and a quiet sense of panic somewhere between Black Friday and December 24?

For a holiday that's supposed to be about humility, warmth, and togetherness, Christmas now carries a strange emotional weight that shows up as financial stress, time pressure, mounting clutter, and the unspoken fear that if you don't get it “right" (i.e. if the gifts aren't thoughtful enough, expensive enough, wrapped perfectly enough) you’ve somehow failed at the most meaningful time of the year.

If that thought makes you uncomfortable, you're not alone.

And more importantly: you're perfectly justified for feeling it.

Christmas wasn’t always this stressful. The version that's exhausting you right now is not the version humanity has been celebrating for centuries. Not even close.

This discomfort you're feeling is just pattern recognition…

We Haven't Lost the Spirit, The Holiday’s Been Reshaped

Let's get this out of the way first:

If modern Christmas feels overwhelming, expensive, rushed, or oddly hollow despite all the "magic," that’s not because you've lost the spirit of the holiday.

It's just that the holiday you're experiencing has been fundamentally reshaped by systems that were never designed to help people rest, connect, or feel content.

They were designed to move products. To increase quarterly sales figures. To turn November and December into the make-or-break months that determine whether retailers stay profitable.

The pressure to buy more, spend more, give more, decorate more, travel more, post more, and somehow make it all look effortlessly magical didn't arise naturally from centuries of graceful traditions.

It was engineered.

And once you see that -the machinery humming beneath the surface- the constant low-level discomfort starts to make perfect sense. What you're reacting to isn't Christmas itself but the commercial apparatus wrapped around it, squeezing tighter every year.

Christmas Is Much Older (And Simpler) Than We Think

One of the reasons modern Christmas feels so confusing and contradictory is because many of the things we associate with the holiday didn't actually originate with Christianity at all (I know…bare with me.)

Early Christians didn't celebrate Christmas the way we do now. In fact, for the first few centuries of Christianity, the birth of Jesus wasn't even a major celebration. Easter was the big one. The December 25th date came much later (somewhere around the 4th century) layered onto a calendar that already carried deep meaning for millions of people.

Long before Christianity spread throughout the world, people across Europe, Central Asia, and the Near East were already marking the darkest time of the year with rituals focused on light, renewal, and survival.

Though it’s hard to imagine with our modern comforts, winter at the time was genuinely dangerous. Food was scarce. Illness was common. Darkness stretched long. The cold alone could kill you. Coming together in the darkest, coldest months of the year was more about survival than an act of sentiment. It was practical, and it was how communities made it through.

Colourful cones of Picea orientalis, or “Akçam,” thought to have inspired tree decorations around Central Asia and Europe

So people lit fires and candles to push back the darkness. They gathered indoors, sharing warmth and whatever food they'd managed to preserve. They brought evergreen branches inside (holly, ivy, and pine of the local flora) a symbol of hope that life would endure when everything outside looked dead and frozen.

These rituals that kept people alive, connected, and hopeful during the hardest season of the year, eventually became irreplaceable parts of their cultures and religions.

The Tree Was Never About Matching Ornaments

Decorating trees didn't begin as a Christian custom, though it's now completely inseparable from how many of us celebrate Christmas.

Evergreen trees -staying green and alive through winter when everything else would wither- symbolized endurance, resilience, and the promise that spring would return. That life would continue.

Versions of this practice existed across many cultures. Ancient Germanic peoples honoured evergreen trees. Ancient Turkic traditions in Central Asia held sacred trees central to their winter celebrations, tied to renewal and the turning of the year. As people migrated, traded, and settled in new places, these ideas traveled with them, merging with local cultures and evolving.

The tree wasn't originally about perfection or aesthetics. It wasn't about achieving a specific look or matching a colour palette. It certainly wasn't about buying twelve new coordinated ornaments every single year to keep up with trends.

It was about keeping hope alive. A promise of resilience in the darkest time of the year.

Now we stress about whether ours looks as good as the one in the store window.

Santa Claus Was a Real Person, Not a Brand

And then there's Santa Claus.

Before the red suit, before the sleigh pulled by reindeer, before the North Pole workshop and the naughty-or-nice list and the multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns, there was an actual human being:

Nicholas of Myra lived in what is now Türkiye (ancient Anatolia) during the 3rd and 4th centuries. He was a Christian bishop who known for giving quietly and anonymously to people in need.

One of the most enduring stories about Nicholas tells of him helping poor families by secretly leaving gold coins so their daughters wouldn't be forced into dire circumstances simply because there was no money for a dowry. There was no spectacle. No public announcement. No audience. No proof required.

Image by Natalia Olivera

Giving was local. Personal. Human. Anonymous.

Somehow, through centuries of storytelling, cultural evolution, and eventually aggressive 20th-century marketing from companies like Coca-Cola, that story of quiet, compassionate giving evolved into a global expectation that love must be proven with packages, price tags, perfectly wrapped boxes, and a specific amount spent per person.

We went from "Nicholas secretly helped struggling families survive" to "if you don't spend enough, you don't love them."

That's... quite the transition.

How Traditions Were Stacked, Then Shifted, And Broke

Contrary to popular belief, traditions don't stay frozen in time. They are built in layers. They adapt. They absorb pieces of the cultures they encounter.

As Christianity spread westward through the Roman world and beyond, it had to absorb older customs to win people’s hearts. This is how traditions survive across centuries and migrations. Symbols, dates, rituals, and stories layered over time, slowly changing details while keeping their emotional core intact.

Winter light festivals became Christmas celebrations. Community gathering, feasting, evergreen decorations, and feeling of gathering against the darkness remained. Sharing wealth for social prosperity turned into gift-giving.

The real damage, the moment things fundamentally changed, came much later.

Industrialization changed everything about how humans lived and worked. Mass production requires mass consumption. You can't run factories at scale without convincing people to buy what you're making. Holidays, with their built-in emotional resonance, became perfect sales opportunities.

Advertising learned how to link emotion to objects: How to make you feel like love could be measured, weighed, wrapped. How to convince you that your affection was suspect unless it was demonstrated through spending.

Christmas, already rich with centuries of meaning and emotionally significant, became the perfect vehicle.

And at some point, buying became a proxy for caring.

Not because we’re all shallow or materialistic. But because the system rewards consumption, not emotional presence, authenticity, or contentment. Because the economy now needs December to be the biggest spending month of the year. Because every part of modern life is designed to keep you working, buying, and feeling slightly inadequate unless you have the right things.

Ultra unique and personal Christmas gift

The Absurdity We've All Learned to Normalize

So here we are.

A holiday about generosity that leaves millions of people in debt.

A holiday about family that exhausts them before they even arrive.

A holiday about peace on earth that creates crushing pressure, stress, and more waste than any other time of the year.

We produce enormous amounts of waste (food, transportation, electricity, wrapping paper, packaging, plastic toys that break in weeks, decorations used only once to name a few). We rush through gatherings because we have three more to get to. We buy gifts for people we barely know anymore because it feels expected, because not giving feels like a statement, because what if they got you something and you didn't get them anything?

We worry about spending too little, even when we're already spending more than we can afford.

We compare our celebrations to what we see online and feel like we’re sub par every time.

We tell our kids elaborate stories about magical surveillance (“Santa’s watching”) and behavioural scorecards (the Naughty List) and then wonder why they're anxious.

And then we tell ourselves this is all wholesome, comforting tradition.

It isn't.

Tradition is the stuff that lasts centuries (sometimes millennia) because it meets real human needs. This version barely made it past the 1950s before it started cracking under its own weight.

You Don't Need to Reject Christmas to Reclaim It

Here's the part that matters most, the part I need you to really hear:

The things people genuinely love about Christmas, the things that make your chest feel warm, that make you tear up a little, those things are real.

Warmth. Light. Food. Togetherness. Generosity. The feeling of being cared for and understood. The joy of caring for and sharing with others.

These needs are ancient. They predate commerce, capitalism, and modern marketing by thousands of years. They're human. They're universal.

Image by Valeria Boltneva

What's exhausting isn’t the heart of the holiday but the modern expectation that love must be demonstrated through consumption. That your worth as a parent, partner, friend, or family member is measured by what you buy. That you're supposed to do it all, have it all, give it all, and make it look effortless.

And that means you're allowed to do something that feels both radical and beautifully simple at the same time:

Keep the meaning and drop the excess.

Celebrate Christmas in a way that doesn't require a credit card.

Say "this year we're doing it differently."

What Giving Used to Look Like (And Still Could)

For most of human history, gifts were about paying attention and being observant with the people you love because time and attention are your most valuable possessions. It’d be naive to expect to switch gears over night, so we prepared some holiday gift ideas you might liketo try out this season:

Time. Spend an afternoon with someone who's lonely. Listen to understand without your phone in your hand.

Help. Watch someone's kids so they can rest. Fix something that's broken. Shovel their driveway (or just a part of it). Run errands for someone who's overwhelmed.

Food. Cook together. Share what you made. Learn a family recipe or teach someone your family's recipe.

Care. Notice what someone needs and meet that need without announcement.

Presence. Just show up. Be fully there. Not performing. Not documenting. Just feel the joy of existing. This is mostly a gift to yourself, but even better if you can share that feeling with those around you.

Full disclaimer: These gifts don't photograph well for Instagram. They don't have an Amazon link. They don't scale. They don't boost quarterly earnings or get featured in holiday gift guides.

They hit the spot though. They're remembered and they create connection instead of clutter.

And honestly? They're so much easier to give when you're not also trying to buy for seventeen people you barely know.

If Christmas Feels Heavy, Lean In and Listen to That Feeling

Feeling uneasy about modern Christmas doesn't mean you're ungrateful, cynical, or a Grinch (oh, what a perfect plot to discredit people who refuse to fit the status quo…)

Congratulations, you’re noticing the difference between meaning and marketing.

You're noticing that the beautiful and ancient human need to gather, to give, to create light in darkness has been repackaged into something exhausting and expensive and oddly competitive.

Awareness doesn’t kill tradition. It helps us take a step back from our natural instinct to explore and adapt, and ask the right questions so we can remind ourselves what’s important.

If anything, awareness strengthens tradition by repeatedly making sure if we’re still on the right track or if our rituals are becoming redundant -harmful even.

So, question why you're doing things that make you miserable. You're allowed to opt out of the parts that don't resonate with you. You're allowed to create your own version of Christmas that actually feels like what the holiday is supposed to be about.

Your kids won't remember how much you spent. They'll remember how it felt. Whether you were stressed or present. Whether the house felt warm or tense.

Your friends won't remember the gifts. They'll remember the conversation. The laughter. The fact that you showed up.

So…What now?

Christmas didn't begin in a shopping mall. It began in a cold dark winter, with people trying to survive together.

It doesn't have to end in a mall either.

The version of Christmas to celebrate is the one that makes us feel connected instead of lonely and depleted. The one that creates memories instead of debt, and honours what the season was always about: light, warmth, survival, togetherness, and hope.

Everything else is optional.

You already know how to celebrate in a way that feels human. Trust that instinct again.

If you're interested in exploring how commerce and culture became entangled, historian William B. Waits wrote "The Modern Christmas in America: A Cultural History of Gift Giving," and Leigh Eric Schmidt's "Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays" offers deep insight into how holidays became commercialized. For older traditions around food, light, and seasonal rhythms, you might enjoy the many works of archeologist and Sumerologist Muazzez Ilmiye Çığ. For an exploration of more recent winter traditions, consider "The Winter Solstice: The Sacred Traditions of Christmas" by John Matthews. This article is not sponsored.

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