
There’s a reason people go nuts before Christmas, and it’s called evolution. No sane person with the average U.S. household income of $43,000 would consider blowing 0.23% of it on grilling utensils in early winter, but we furrow our brow ridges and want them anyway. Most of us have phones plugged into walls and miraculous miniature cell phones in our pockets, but we lust for the next generation iPhone because, well, its screen has pretty colors.
Holiday shopping is related to hoarding, and psychologists say hoarding is a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder, an evolutionary instinct run amok. Hoarding works great in the wild, because the animals that collect energy and shelter tend to live longer and have healthy offspring. For instance, the Arctic gray jay bird stores more than 100,000 mouthfuls of berries and bugs to make it through winter. Humans buy junk because, almost certainly, in the recent Ice Age our cavepeople ancestors had a choice to store food and pelts before winter or not … and the ones who hoarded mountains of material were the sole survivors. Our great-great-great-great grandpas and grandmas shopped pelts til they dropped. Peaceful, loving, anticommercial types just froze in the cold.
So this holiday season, don’t fight the urge. Go get your Heritage Professional Barbecue Grill Tool Set, your Amazon Kindle, your Down Ice Scraper Mitt. It’s good for today’s economy. And tomorrow, your future great-great-great-grandchildren are counting on it.