It is a toxic yet useless discomfort. But many people want to exploit it to make us feel bad about our triumph over misery. This is the progressive Christmas. It turns the holiday season, which should be about celebration, into another reason to feel guilty about who we are and how we live. Oddly enough, the feeling of existential guilt is typically Christian; progressives cling to the worst and reject the best of Christianity.

Perhaps what is most annoying about progressives is that they are boring. They are constantly telling us how bad we are and criticizing our plans to consume more. But why do they care? And if it bothers them, too bad. Consumption is among the best and most moral things we can do because it consists in nothing less that directly satisfying our needs and desires. And, fortunately for the people, instead of heeding the progressives’ cries, we are consuming more, because we are growing wealthier.

The anti-consumerist slogan is repeated more often than any big-box store advert, and, like every progressive mantra, has the reproachful tone of a cranky old priest -making it all the more charming. It is as negative a message as they come. If we shouldn’t consume, what do we do with the rest of our income? Save, I suppose. Why, then, don’t they launch a positive message encouraging everyone to save, even though it is Christmas? Because saving and investing, which creates more wealth, isn't their bag. An ownership society is one composed of independent individuals with sufficient resources to make their own decisions. The mere idea of such a society fills progressives with horror. So don’t expect them to change their anathema to consumption into a call for savings.
 
In the end (who would have imagined?), the ideal progressive Christmas citizen is Scrooge, the character from Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Buying presents (you know, when we think of others and demonstrate that with a present) is just dirty capitalist consumerism. Not spending a cent and contributing nothing to the consumerist wheel is an unparalleled progressive virtue. Scrooge would be an environmentalist hero, adopting such miserly behavior as not turning on the electricity. He even renounced the division of labor, that is, capitalism, making everything he could for himself. Scrooge is icon of the progressive religion, but one "believers," of course, don’t want to imitate.