The hollowing out of Christmas: how tech killed the festivities

Remember the Christmas of yore? Decorating trees, singing carols, handwritten cards and making mulled wine. In the streets, you perhaps found roast chestnuts. Collective celebrations were a gleeful time when neighborhoods would commingle and build snowmen.

Tech was minimal and played a supporting role in the odd Home Alone movie and hearing Silent Night on the radio. There were actual radio Christmas specials with various carol services from abbeys or cathedrals.

Now, in my family's home, there’s an Amazon Alexa in the kitchen, and it’s mostly a case of asking it for a Christmas playlist, and then it just automatically plays Wham, then an ad, then Mariah Carey, and then another ad. It’s so transactional, it feels like ordering from a vending machine.

Though ordering gifts on Amazon is a blessing of convenience, there was something glorious about the clamor of slapdash ordering at the store. Compared to asking AI for gift ideas and getting Amazon to send things over – and joining Prime so they dictate your festive movies to you, it sucks the life out of it.

Today’s Christmases are increasingly individualistic – virtual Christmas markets are live-streamed, and the sense of community, never mind being eroded, feels decimated.

Last night, I was eating burgers in the shopping mall when my friend looked at me and asked, “When was the turning point for this?” By “this,” I think he meant an abstract feeling of emptiness.

And, of course, it’s debatable – the gift voucher era of the 1990s, the rise of social media in the 2000s, or the individualistic and performative aspect of short-form videos of the 2010s could be worth a punt, or again, Amazon and the death of bricks-and-mortar shopping.

For me, though, it was the pandemic when physical boundaries were actually enforced between people, virtual gatherings became more common, supply chain issues were rife, and gifts were generally last-minute clicks.

As we recently reported, there is a growing sense of entitlement among TikTok users making wish-lists for the gifts they want, and here, it feels so synthetic. One user I found posted “what every girl wants for Christmas.” How do they know every girl? There are also guides for “what all guys want for Christmas,” and I’ve never seen such a flock mentality.

Then there’s the tech aspect of Christmas. The feeling I experienced in the mall was one of dystopian flatness. Every store seems like a clone of another store. It felt like the artifice of Black Friday continues to dribble right into December; a lukewarm Las Vegas not even simmering.

Burgers cost twenty bucks. Human shopping activity is being covertly surveilled. The chilling effect of having cameras everywhere, zoom calls with your loved ones with stupid facial effects, being spoon fed piss-poor Netflix seasons, having drone surveillance at Christmas events, virtual Santa calls, and fake 50% sale banners on shop windows.

All while trying to outwardly socialize, our conversation about whether life is actually a simulation became all the more relevant. My friend and I were two avatars walking along, not singing a song, confused in a winter-data land.