Happy Holidays From Niagara At Large

Niagara At Large wishes you and your family and friends a peaceful Holiday Season.

We also wish to take this time to thank each and every one of you for your support over the past year as readers and contributors to this independent online news and commentary site for our region.

With your continued support, we look forward to taking this online news project to a plateau where we can sustain it in the New Year and for many years to come as the one free and open voice for news and commentary of interest and concern to residents across our greater binational Niagara region.

We get so much feedback from people across our region, urging us to keep on keepin’ on and to grow Niagara At Large, if we can to make up for what so many also say is a failing of the mainstream media to take on the hotter issues like hospital care, environmental protection, questionable development plans like the high-rise condos planned for Port Dalhousie and Crystal Beach, and others.

We’ve also had many readers pat us on the back for casting a more regional light on the news – for reporting and commenting on matters of interest to all Niagarians – and to extend that to our neighbours across the river in Erie and Niagara Counties, New York. At Niagara At Large, we believe that when it comes to the challenges we face today around the state of our economy, the health of our environment and tourism, just to mention a few, the interest of people on both sides of our binational border are entwined.

Finally, we are pleased to say that our policy – one that separates us from so many other “blog sites” on the planet – of posting comments from only those who share their real names is working. Contrary to some of advised us that we would discourage commentary if we required people to attach their names, we have received thousands of comments to this site and I would not be surprised if we have received more than many of the mainstream news outlets in this region.

We know leave you with a recent Christmas message from Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper that we welcome you to respond to. Following that is a video you may enjoy – just a bit of Christmas craziness from a very good Niagara-based band called Bag of Hatts and friend of Niagara At Large, featuring guest Terry Nicholls on hand drums – for a touch of Feliz Navidad

Still searching for the true meaning of Christmas

It’s Christmas time again with all of the sights and sounds of jingling bells, caroling and most important of all– and let’s not fool ourselves because Christmas these days is mainly an industry – the swipe, swipe, swipe of credit cards.

Christmas industry madness in full tilt.

And few individuals aid and abet the Christmas industry more than television news anchors. Turn on just about any commercial channel on the tube in the final weeks leading up to Christmas and watch these anchors performing between commercials for products that most often make gifts for adults rather than children. As if Christmas is mostly for children. That notion – in an age where a good number of adults going back to baby boomers like me have had few or no children, but do have some buying power – is about as passé as roasting chestnuts over an open fire.

Anyway, the television news anchor flashes a giddy smile into the camera following another battery of commercials on everything from some whirly new tool for the guy to some sexy bedtime clothing for the wife, and reminds you that ‘there are only x many days to get all that shopping in!’ They spend more time than they do reporting on the ongoing war in Afghanistan or the recent climate change conference in Cancun, Mexico telling out about the deadlines for ordering your gifts through online outlets like Amazon.com or for mailing a package through the post office.

This is not just coming from channels across the border in the good ol’ U.S.A., by the way. This past weekend, there was an anchor for the national news on CBC TV, gazing out through the camera with a vacuous grin, proclaiming that this Christmas season, following a year or two of deep recession, “Canadians are spending more freely again.” The news spot now turns to a representative of the retail industry expressing satisfaction over the prospect of all this free spending, while the screen pans to close-ups of those credit card machines – swipe, swipe, swipe – before they flash to a financial advisor saying that all of this will be fine until the consumers get their credit card bills in January and February and discover they are “in trouble.” But the dose of reality from the financial advisor only runs for about 15 seconds because now it is time to cut back to the commercials.

 Now if this is beginning to sound like I am coming across like one of those old-time Catholic priests or United Church ministers badgering their congregations with sermons about materialism over-riding the true meaning of Christmas, I don’t mind confessing that I haven’t been to church very much since they gave me crayons to fill in colouring books at Sunday school.

But forget about this lost soul’s church attendance. Isn’t Christmas, first and foremost, supposed to be about celebrating the birth of the Christ child? Through all of the marketing in the weeks leading up to Christmas, you hardly here anything about that, do you?
 
Talk of the Christ child only comes up in any big way if you happen to attend something equivalent to “midnight mass” or turn on the tube after the stores have closed on Christmas Eve. Then, for next 24 hours or so, there is hardly anything on the air but church services and the annual snoring message from the Queen. I’ve had people I’ve known over the years, who pretend to be more religious than I, surfing around the channels for Oprah or a wrestling match or America’s Funniest Videos, only to complain about how boring TV is on Christmas Day.

But not to worry. If you can survive all those televised sermons, not to mention a few hours with your in-laws over turkey stuffing, you’ll wake up the following morning to Boxing Day and you’ll be liberated. You’ll be able to go shopping again!

I love how so many stores in recent years have taken to urging people not to return unwanted or non-working items they got for Christmas on Boxing Day because they don’t want to clog up their serving lines with people who want to buy even more stuff.

Don’t know about you, but I’m 59-years old and already have so much stuff piled up in our home, I probably couldn’t get rid of it all if I held lawn sales every week next summer. And yet I am still getting books and cds I already have from other adults who feel they have to get these things because the marketers for the Christmas industry told them to do it.

All of this is going on while we’re being told in the media that increasing numbers of households in our country are going into debt. What’s going on here? And why does Christmas have to be more about swipe, swipe, swipe of the plastic than enjoying a few warm moments with our friends and families?

(Visit Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to residents in our greater binational Niagara region.)