Now that Halloween has passed, the Christmas holiday PR blitz is full steam ahead. On radio this morning, Glenn explained why he is torn about the early, commercialized buildup to the holiday and reminisced about the wild fluctuations in how he has approached Christmas. Why does he struggle so much with this holiday?
“I guess we're after Halloween, so we can say perfect for the holiday season,” Glenn said on radio this morning. “We had this conversation just the other day, that I am really tired of the commercialism part of Christmas, but I really like the spirit of it.”
“Everything is going up already. There was a section at Target the other day that already had stuff up before Halloween,” Stu said. “You have had a weird struggle with Christmas over the years. I remember one year where Glenn – this is before you were here, Pat – but Glenn got in this mode of realizing he had some money for once in his life, and decided to buy everyone he knew the most extravagant Christmas present ever. I got like the best Mac they made. It was awesome computer, like the top of the line.”
Glenn explained that he has had Christmases at both ends of the spectrum. There were years earlier in his career in which he could barely afford to buy his daughter the ornament she wanted from CVS. And then there were the more recent years in which he could buy just about anything his children’s hearts desired. But is it really worth it?
“I have done the Christmas where I could not afford something for my kids at CVS. I couldn't afford an ornament at CVS,” Glenn said. “Then I went five or ten years later, when we hit it, I decided this Christmas, I have money, I am going to buy everything that I want to buy for everybody I know. So I bought everything I could. And literally, the stack of presents under the tree came up almost to my chest. It was insane. That was worse than the Christmas I couldn't afford things. It was so empty. And both of them were lies. Both of them were lies. One was ‘I'm really super-great because I'm giving all these presents,’ and it was empty. There was nothing to it? So that's kind of where I'm kind of split. I try to find the middle place.”
While Glenn is hoping to find the middle ground with Christmas this year by requiring his family to only exchange gifts that are hand made, Stu wasn’t so sure he will be able to achieve his ultimate objective.
“You are never trying to find the middle,” Stu exclaimed. “You are trying to find a new extreme way to go: You can't buy anything new.”
“You have to make it out of sod,” Pat joked. “Whatever present you give has to be from sod.”