The holiday season is the time of year when people get together to enjoy family time and also to spend the most amount of money they will for the entire year.

The time from Black Friday to Christmas has become less about being together and more about spending enormous amounts of money on each other. Many companies have taken full advantage of this by turning that time of year into a consumerist hysteria. A lot of it is owed to materialism and capitalism that surrounds the holidays, especially during the 2021 shopping season.

Materialism, the idea that objects and possessions are more important than moral values, has become a major problem over the years. This particularly comes to fruition during the holiday season when buying gifts almost now seems mandatory.

According to the National Retail Federation, Americans’ average holiday expenses were $998, which is a 17 percent increase within the past decade.

This upward trend of money spent every year during the holiday season proves that materialism is progressively getting worse. There is so much money being spent on gifts that a significant amount of shoppers are going into debt because of this season.

According to a recent poll by Cardify, 56 percent of shoppers have used the “buy now, pay later” method.

This means that because they could not afford to pay up front, they had to pay later, but many of the customers could not do that either. Not only has the amount of spending money increased but it is negatively impacting a lot of customers and putting them in debt.

Capitalism has also played a large role in this large amount of spending during the 2021 holiday season. Capitalism is an economic system in which industry and trade are controlled by private owners for profit. Most of the time, stores and companies will start advertising for the holidays before Thanksgiving to promote Christmas and Black Friday sales. This is because they are all competing against each other for customers to buy their product instead of a product from another company.

These target consumers for their profit by making holiday-themed advertisements so that you associate their brand with that time of year. Consumer capitalism is correlated with the holidays to create an idealized seasonal tradition that promotes extreme market consumption.

Junior at NDB, Amy Kanzaki, talks about her experience with Christmas shopping, saying, “Although I love giving gifts to people, I don’t like how materialistic the holiday season has become. It should be more about spending time with family and friends rather than spending money on each other.”

The 2021 holiday shopping season was surrounded by promotions, advertisements, deals, and a lot of money being spent. This is mostly due to the early overuse of holiday advertisements constantly being pushed in front of customers therefore the customers having too large costs to pay. Although giving gifts to others around the holidays is sometimes a tradition, next year’s holiday season customers can focus more on giving the gift of time to each other.