From the desk

The Christmas season is here. That’s right, even though Thanksgiving has just barely graced us with its presence, Christmas seems to have thrown up all over our local department stores and radio stations.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas. I love giving gifts and drinking coffee by the fire under the lights of a tree decorated in a haphazardous manner. However, I don’t like Christmas junk.

On a side note, in a similar fashion, I don’t like Jesus junk. I love Jesus, but I don’t need the T-shirt, pillowcase, waffle maker, bumper sticker, sunglasses, post-it notes, journal, linens, or the cute little bobble head.

So every year when Christmas rolls around and my ears are molested by Christmas music — which, by the way, seems to be coming earlier every year — I can’t help but let the bitterness set in.

Decorations are nice. A touch of red here, and a bit of green there — but why on earth do we need to completely re-decorate our homes with everything red and green?

If you ask me, it is just another excuse for over-driven women with too much time on their hands to cling to something other than their over-smothered children for a season.

According to the National Retail Federation, the average dollar amount most Americans over the age of 18 will spend on gifts, decorations and other holiday paraphernalia is $832.26.

For $24 a sex slave in most third world countries can be freed for 24 hours. That means 34 people could be freed per person in the US.

There are 209,128,094 adults in the US. That means 7,110,355,196 people could be freed for the price of one Christmas.

America could single-handedly abolish the sex slave industry by only sacrificing one holiday.

Yet, instead we spend our hundreds on ridiculous music and ugly sweaters.

Therein lies my hatred for the holidays. It is not that I am some sort of Scrooge, I simply see that there is a bigger picture that we seem to have been neglecting.

What if we took one holiday season and instead of spending the average of $832.26 we cut it back to $430. With the extra $402.26 per adult, America could set 3,505,161,128 people free.

We could literally change the world.

So next time you go to pick up that cute little snowman to sit idly on your front porch for two months before it is tucked away to be forgotten for the next 10 months, think of the lives you could be saving — I know I will be.