Tag Archives: Christmas

Buy friends and families barrels of oil for Christmas

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I’ve thought about this before…

Oil prices continued to fall today, with two different measures of the commodity’s price hitting five-year lows. Oil can currently be had for $64.10 a barrel in some circumstances.

A barrel of oil is 42 gallons.

Who do you know that could use 42 gallons of freshly drilled oil? Everyone! Oil is important for producing energy, which powers cars and flat-screen televisions through a scientific process known as “pushing the button on the remote control or turning the key in the ignition.”

And what season is it? Christmas season! The season for giving things to people. Do you see where I’m going with this? Oil is this year’s hottest and most affordable Christmas gift.

The practical issues are immense – how would an individual refine the oil? how many people could easily store the barrels? These barrels can’t exactly be bought and sold at Walmart – but it is hard to argue with giving people something they need. Why give superfluous gifts when every driver could use cheap oil?

What a sociologist learned about giving Christmas gifts from Middletown

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Middletown (Muncie, Indiana) holds a special place in American sociology though the findings of two 1970s studies (ASR and AJS) about giving Christmas gifts based on the community are not as well known. Here are a few selections from the two articles:

“The 110 respondents in the sample gave 2,969 gifts and received 1,378 gifts, a mean of 27 given and 13 received. Participants in this gift system should give (individually or jointly) at least one Christmas gift every year to their mothers, fathers, sons, daughters; to the current spouses of these persons; and to their own spouses. By the operation of this rule, participants expect to receive at least one gift in return from each of these persons excepting infants…Gifts to grandparents and grandchildren seem to be equally obligatory if these live in the same community or nearby, but not at greater distances. Christmas gifts to siblings are not required.

Parents expect to give more valuable and more numerous gifts to their minor children and to their adult children living at home than they receive in return. This imbalance is central to the entire ritual. The iconography of Middletown’s secular Christmas emphasizes unreciprocated giving to children by the emblematic figure of Santa Claus, and the theme of unreciprocated giving provides one of the few connections between the secular and religious iconography of the festival-the Three Wise Men coming from a distant land to bring unreciprocated gifts to a child.”…

“Most of Middletown’s gift giving occurs between close kin…the pattern it displays shows up the two principal points of stress in the contemporary American family. The first point of stress is the insecurity of the spousal relationship. Viewed cross-culturally, the contemporary American family is unusual in exhibiting a very high level of interaction between spouses while permitting easy, almost penalty-free divorce at the initiative of either spouse at any point in the life cycle. Since divorce is always more than a remote possibility in a Middletown marriage, the relationship with affinal relatives [in-laws] is always a little uneasy.

The individual message [of a gift] says, “I value you according to the degree of our relationship” and anticipates the response, “I value you in the same way.” But the compound message that emerges from the unwrapping of gifts in the presence of the whole gathering allows more subtle meanings to be conveyed. It permits the husband to say to the wife, “I value you more than my parents” or the mother to say to the daughter-in-law, “I value you as much as my son so long as you are married to him” or the brother to say to the brother, “I value you more than our absent brothers, but less than our parents and much less than my children.” These statements, taken together, would define and sustain a social structure, if only because, by their gift messages, both parties to each dyadic relationship confirm that they have the same understanding of the relationship and the bystanders, who are interested parties, endorse that understanding by tacit approval.”

This is not the first time the media has discussed these studies but I do give credit for actually let the sociological studies speak for themselves. However, there should be a demerit for titling the web page “Christmas gift exchange: The anthropological rules beneath it.” This is based on sociological studies – these disciplines are not the same thing!

I suppose this could be a case where someone would read this and say this is all obvious. Isn’t sociology just common sense? Yet, even these small excerpts reveal some interesting findings. Physical distance matters, particularly when you get beyond the nuclear family. Additionally, Caplow notes that gift-giving between spouses is laden with meaning that can either support or undermine a marriage. While I suspect the kinds of gifts exchanged in the late 1970s might have shifted today, Caplow found money could generally be given one-way from older family members to younger family members, but not in reverse.

Considering all the hoopla surrounding Christmas in the United States and elsewhere around the world, it is a little surprising more sociologists don’t study Christmas behaviors and patterns…

Pope: modern society doesn’t leave much room for God

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Pope Benedict’s Christmas Eve mass included this commentary about the role of religion in modern society:

“Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We begin to do so when we have no time for him,” said the pope, wearing gold and white vestments.

“The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full,” he said.

The leader of the world’s some 1.2 billion Roman Catholics said societies had reached the point where many people’s thinking processes did not leave any room even for the existence of God.

“Even if he seems to knock at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the ‘God hypothesis’ becomes superfluous,” he said.

“There is no room for him. Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so ‘full’ of ourselves that there is no room left for God.”

This sounds like a secularization argument to me: the rational thinking that began off several centuries ago before and during the Enlightenment has squeezed out God. It also reminds me of the 2004 book Sacred and Secular by Norris and Inglehart that suggested the modern welfare state has met more people’s daily needs so there is less need for God.

Additionally, the Pope also suggests modern technologies that offered to help make our lives more efficient now just take up more of our time. Is the Pope simply a crank from an older generation or is this prescient commentary about the downsides of technology millions the world over have adopted?

Live video feed of a 100 house gingerbread community

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If you are looking for holiday architecture, check out this live feed of a 100 house gingerbread community. Curbed provides a brief description of the community:

Design-y Japanese retailer Muji has taken the whole genre up another notch, this time with a tiny gingerbread town, complete with 100 houses created from 15,000 Muji snacks. There’s a commuter train; hay bales; tiny residents shoveling snow, heading to work, and chatting with neighbors; and even mini video projections. The burg is on display in Toyko until Christmas Day, but the company has also installed a 24-hour live feed for virtual visitors. And yet again, Muji has enlisted children to help build stuff—watch the video and see some close-up shots below.

I checked the live feed last night and it looked like the gingerbread village was asleep. The music is also catchy but I imagine it could get annoying really quickly. I’ll have to check back today to see if the town is more lively today…

Two other notes:

1. Does gingerbread architecture differ across cultures? While this community was put together by a Japanese corporation, it looks like it is made up of fairly traditional and Western architecture.

2. Since this is put together by a retailer, I assume this is supposed to lead me to buy something. Gingerbread house kits? Model train sets?

Christmas shopping for sociology majors and for those want to sociologically disrupt some Christmas rituals

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Connecting sociology and Christmas gifts is not an easy task. But here are two web pages that aim to do just that: selecting a gift for a sociology major and selecting gifts that help disrupt typical Christmas rituals in the United States.

1. A “college student gift guide” suggests sociology majors should be given a white sweatshirt with the message “I heart Sociology.” I don’t understand this gift as the suggestions for the other majors involve gifts that actually have to do with the major. Why a sweatshirt? But, if you start to think about it, what could you give a sociology major that is uniquely about social structures and society? Perhaps a coupon or cash to go toward extra-special people-watching? (One of my students recently mentioned the rich possibilities of Venice Beach, California.) Perhaps the latest version of their favorite data software like Stata or Atlas.ti so they can feverishly work some analyses over the holiday? Perhaps a box set of their favorite sociological monographs? A copy of The Sims or SimCity to do a little pop culture simulation?

2. The “Sociology of Style’s Holiday Gift Guide” has five Week One suggestions regarding “Gifts that Give Back.” Of the five options, four of them feature the same logic: if you have to consume (is this what the ritual of Christmas has become?), you can do so in more responsible ways that can benefit other people as well. Is Product Red out of style?

I think we are a long way away before Amazon.com has dedicated gift lists for the sociologist in your life. At the same time, the American Sociological Association could get on this and perhaps raise some funds that could lower dues and pay for other expenses…

Jimmy Kimmel helps show what happens when Christmas gift-giving norms are broken

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A recent Jimmy Kimmel bit titled “I Gave My Kids a Terrible Present” exposes what happens when Christmas gift-giving norms are violated:

Judging by YouTube comments, some view the tears as an indictment of children’s materialism at Christmas. Others, including the playfully sadistic parents in some of the videos, just think it’s funny…

Some viewers have equated the tantrums of some of the children with greediness. But Lisa Wade, an assistant professor of sociology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, argued that while some children appear greedier than others, all are reacting to a perceived break in social rules about gifting.

“Because social rules are so complicated, when kids are little, they’re really trying to learn them, so they take them very seriously,” she said…

Some critics have called the videos cruel, as they did in November when Mr. Kimmel invited parents to pretend they had eaten all their kids’ Halloween candy. (That montage has more than 25 million YouTube views.) But, as Dr. Wade noted, learning to take a joke is another crucial social skill.

Are these the sort of sociological insights and life lessons one should share with someone else’s kids? After seeing the horrified and tearful reactions of some of these kids, would this easily get IRB approval?

Also noteworthy: giving young kids opposite gender gifts is very problematic. This hints at how quickly kids are socialized into gendered roles.

The sociological guide to giving Christmas gifts

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Here are nine sociological rules for giving gifts at Christmas. Several things to note:

1. This comes out of the long-running study of “Middletown,” otherwise known as Muncie, Indiana. I am still amazed at all of the material uncovered over the decades in this project.

2. These rules were originally published in a 1984 article in the American Journal of Sociology titled “Rule Enforcement Without Visible Means: Christmas Gift Giving in Middletown.” I tend to think of AJS as being austere so I’m not quite sure what to make of the inclusion of this article…

3. I wonder if some of these rules have changed in recent years.

4. One final question: if a sociologist started explaining his or her family’s gift giving practices in this way to the participants, how many families would have a favorable reaction?

Shop to feel altruistic this holiday season

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Even as some people react negatively to big retailers moving up their Black Friday hours, perhaps there is hope for conquering Christmas commercialism: you can shop and feel altruistic.

Sociologist Keith Brown of Saint Joseph’s University said the holidays bring many motivations to buy, buy, buy — but beyond the sale prices and must-have items is something greater for consumers to consider.

“The current recession coincided with an ‘ethical turn’ in the markets,” Brown said in a statement…

“An increasing number of consumers from all socioeconomic segments are looking to pay it forward, but especially those who have been only minimally impacted by the recession,” Brown said. “They’re looking for ‘Made in America,’ ‘Fair Trade,’ or ‘Eco-friendly.’ They want to add a socially responsible dimension to their gift-giving. Many consumers sincerely want to make a difference in the world through shopping. Consumers like to give gifts that have a story about where the product came from, who made it and how the producer benefited by selling the object.”

Conversely, Brown said that the recipients often feel good, too.

Extra Christmas shopping bonus: the more you spend, the more you are helping the US economy!

This does alert us to the values that get attached to buying products.