What a scary Halloween this was! It wasn't the goblins and ghosts nor the skeletons and spiders. It was not the haunted houses or the ghoulish costumes. It was the Christmas decorations up already! That's really scary!

The glut of election flyers touting this or that candidate was barely over this year before the holiday catalogues began to arrive. My poor mailbox did not get a day's rest! There was advertising for wine baskets, furniture, clothes, and even cremation. On top of that, credit card companies began inundating me with new cards with low APR's. I even received a couple of holiday cards already from firms hoping to snare my business--and it wasn't even Thanksgiving! The annual December Commercial Orgy is upon us.

Yet the consumer drumbeat on Main Street is only the end result of the drumbeat from Wall Street. Analysts have been calculating retail expectations for months. Wal-Mart and Macy's, Penney's and Kohl's have been teasing investors with projected revenues for the holiday season since August. Mattel's first reaction to the lead paint in toys from China back in June was not concern for the safety of children. It was to forecast the impact that a recall would have on their sales in December. For that matter, the toy manufacturers met back in January to evaluate what was big and what flopped from the year before and immediately began testing new products. Television ads started in October with snow and gift themes. As if we in this country are not already bloated with too much "stuff," the entire economic engine of corporate America unleashes a crescendo of messages in ever increasing intensity this time of year to buy, buy, buy more. It's like an artillery bombardment during World War I. It's incessant, destructive, and potentially lethal!

A growing number of Americans, and I among them, are becoming more and more conscious of our carbon footprint on this planet. We are beginning to think far beyond recycling and carpooling to the greater impacts of our consumption habits. We are beginning to realize the consequences and connections of our choices.

Take Christmas trees for example. Millions of healthy trees are cut down every year in our forests. Others are grown as a cash crop on tree farms, yet it still takes fertilizer to grow them quickly for market and gas to transport them to tree lots for sale. Fertilizer is produced using hydrocarbons from oil; and gas, of course, comes from oil, too. We put the trees in our homes for a week or two and then litter the sidewalks with their lifeless remains when we are done with them. Trucks burning more gas pick them up and cart them off. Some are burned, releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Others go to landfills to rot and release methane.

Artificial trees are no better. Most are made of plastic, which is made from oil. The oil is taken from the Middle East, or Venezuela, or Nigeria and transported in smelly polluting tankers to China. There it is turned into plastic by underpaid laborers in Chinese sweatshops, fashioned into artificial trees and shipped again in smelly polluting freighters to the United States. One only shudders at what happens to these kinds of trees once their owners discard them!

At least as many trees are cut down to provide the paper for all the advertising flyers and catalogues, the coupons and the mailers, which avalanche upon us this time of year. These trees are also transported, turned into pulp, mixed with chemicals, and printed with ink before the postal clerk drives another gas-burning vehicle to deliver them to our homes. The same process applies to cards. All those sentimental, funny, or religious greeting cards were living trees once. After their destruction, it is so sad to receive a card that has nothing but a signature. Bless those people who actually write a decent message or enclose their year-end report!

But decoration, advertising, and cards are not the only sacrifices we demand of trees during this season. Packaging consumes an enormous volume of cardboard and paper, as well as styrofoam and plastic. There are the shipping containers, the individual gift boxes, the internal gift stabilizers, and of course the wrapping paper. All this gets thrown out as trash. Careful recycling helps reduce the mountains of packaging trash that ends up in landfills, but unfortunately much still gets there, anyway.

Then there are the gifts themselves. To be sure, many presents are useful and practical--the kind of items the recipient has been needing but just could not justify or find the time to get. These are wonderful presents and greatly appreciated. They improve lives and remind those we've given them to of us every time they use the item. So why did we wait until December to give it to them? Did we not love the recipient in September or April? This is what giving gifts should be--personal expressions of love.

Yet love is the least of the motivations promoted by corporate America to prop up its December revenues. Much easier to project and manipulate are baser motivations such as greed, guilt, expectations, reciprocity, and obligation. The message is "more is better" and the measure of caring is the size and expense and quantity of the gifts. How much anguish and anxiety is caused by these unrelenting marketing messages? How much do they tear at the hearts of well meaning citizens who want nothing more than simply to be loved and to love? How perversely has the corporate machine corrupted this season?

Instead of tokens of love and good cheer with friends, the drumbeat of demand for more and more "stuff" means longer hours for some poor Chinese laborer slaving to supply it. It means more US treasure going overseas and a larger US trade deficit and a weaker dollar--which in turn reduces our ability to pay. If we can't pay, we go on credit and credit companies slam us with late charges and finance charges and drive down our American middle class into lower class and the lower class into outright poverty. The drumbeat of demand sucks the life out of humanity to feed the insatiable appetite for corporate growth.

Why do we do this to ourselves every December? Sure, Americans consume way too much "stuff" all year round and our bulging dumpsters and waistlines show it. Yet by the end of November, the retail mania reaches tsunami proportions. Marketers fan the flames with special sales at 5:00 am the day after Thanksgiving! People actually get up at 3:00 in the morning to stand like lemmings in front of big box stores to rush in before the eastern horizon shows even the faintest pink. No wonder so many people fall sick in January with flu or colds. So much for a season of peace and love!

December no longer has anything to do with some kid in Bethlehem who couldn't afford any of this "stuff" even if it were around in his day. Nor does it have anything to do with oil lamps burning for eight days in Jerusalem or Pagans cheered by the return of the sun. This pursuit of more and more "stuff" has nothing to do with anybody's religion at all, unless of course you get religious about corporate profits and earnings per share. The December Commercial Orgy is an artificial demand created by corporate America to drive the engine of the world economy.

Stop the train! I want off! I don't want any more "stuff." I don't want to harm any trees or enslave any Chinese. I don't want to cause any more pollution on my planet. I don't want to burn electricity in colored lights or burn fuel in unnecessary transportation. I don't want to miss the beauties of this season rushing around in shopping malls. Forget the presents and the cards. There is much more to this season to enjoy if we turn off the noise to appreciate it. Each of us surely has a list of favorite things that bring joy or communicate love and which do not involve a shopping mall. However you celebrate this solstice season, do it gently with a light tread upon our planet. Gaia is sleeping.