Laments Christmas excess

Nov. 25 is Black Friday to many (shops and shopaholics) and to others it’s just “Fur-free Friday.”

While I can, and have, respected Fur-free Fridays for many years, I personally find that Black Friday, for all those Christmas shoppers amongst us is, an insensitive and rather disrespectful shopping feast when one considers what has been happening in the world now and for many, many months.

With the horrors of war continuing, with babies, children, women, old people, as well as hospitals, schools, residential apartment buildings etc.being under constant attack, I find it amazing so many of us here in safe Canada can bring themselves to go all out to shop until we drop, interested in buying at the cheapest prices all those Christmas presents for thousands of Canadian kids who already have way more than any kid should ever own.

Is that how insensitive and pathetically uncaring we have become? It certainly seems that way.

It’s what we do each and every year—kill thousands of turkeys, ducks, chickens and whatever other animals seem to be celebratory enough to us and have a good old time celebrating with giant plastic trees and an overload of useless presents. We can stuff the remains of all the previous Christmas times into our already over-stuffed garages, where nobody nowadays can even find room for their cars anymore.

Yes, it is a sad and traumatic time for so many people in this world and the war in Ukraine brings—or should bring—it home to us here on a daily basis, even if we don’t want to think about it or see it on our oversized TVs anymore.

I believe we would all feel a little happier about ourselves if we just forgot about the overload of presents and used whatever money we planned to splurge on presents nobody needs, on donations to the Ukrainian people.

NATO is sending plenty of war arms to help fight off the Russian attacks, but as long as (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is still the “emperor” of his war, millions of Ukrainian people do not know whether they’ll live another hour, day or week.

Who cares about Christmas when so many are hovering in cold shelters, afraid every hour of their surviving days. It is simply wrong to celebrate such a feast of expensive dead animals and useless toys while people are being murdered for no other reason than some idiot wants to be a conqueror again, no matter the cost.

A true Christmas spirit would be to give and give as much as we can afford to the people of Ukraine, the homeless, the poor, as well as the hundreds of thousands of abused and unwanted animals in this world.

Believe me, it feels much better to do that than to go into debt because our dear families must have it all, but never enough, and waste our dollars on “made in China” junk that has become a huge part of life.

Instead of murdering millions of animals, let’s set an example and have a humane vegetarian dinner.

Manon Mulder, Kelowna