I was out for a run early Sunday morning, savoring the quiet streets and letting my thoughts dwell on the pleasure of movement, the fun music I was listening to, and – above all – Advent and Christmas. This is by far my favorite time of year. I love the weak winter sun that shines through the bare trees, the early dark in the evenings and the comfort of the fire to get us through it, the anticipation of seeing or at least talking to family, my children’s Christmas performances, Christmas morning service…you get the picture. Given that my husband is German, our family has the double enjoyment of keeping two Christmas traditions. One of the German traditions I’ve come to love is lighting the Advent wreath. Every Sunday afternoon in Advent, we gather at the table and light a new candle on the wreath, until, just before Christmas, all four blaze. We eat the German Lebkucken and Stollen that my mother-in-law sends from Germany every year, and if the children aren’t too wriggly, we read a Christmas story they like, such as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. Given that it was Sunday, I was thinking particularly about lighting the next Advent candle as I ran, both keenly looking forward to it and wondering if the children would fight over the cookies or if we’d pull the whole thing off calmly. With my thoughts thus pleasantly occupied, I ran on to Broadview Street, whereupon I was stopped in my tracks by an advertisement hanging in the window of the Toronto Dominion Bank. “This season, celebrate convenience!” the ad said brightly; beneath these words, a relaxed woman beamed joy and contentment.

This was the most depressing rendering of the seasonal spirit that I had ever seen. Poof went all my happy Christmas thoughts, replaced with something akin to outrage.

I took a deep breath and started running again, leaving the sign behind me. As I jogged past the quiet shops with their merry window displays, I tried to figure out why “celebrate convenience” bothered me so much. After all, convenience is sort of the TD bank’s “thing”, the way they distinguish their big-Canadian-bank-brand from all the other big Canadian banks. And convenience is nice, no doubt about that. It makes life easy and…convenient.

As I rounded towards home, it dawned on me that my irritation went beyond the fact that the ad trivialized and commercialized the season. We’re all used to that. Rather, my reaction centered on the bank’s use of the word “celebrate”. Celebrate is a big word, an important word. In my understanding of it, it doesn’t just mean “be mildly happy about”, it means marking something with rites and ceremonies, to praise it publicly, to honour it. Celebrations are profound parts of human existence: they tell us what matters to us personally and communally. The philosopher Albert Borgmann has argued that to live human lives rich with depth and meaning, we need to understand celebration as “centered on some concrete thing…a joyful engagement with the physical presence and radiance of that thing”, be it a space, a gathering of people, an event, an Advent wreath, or some other thing that is powerful enough to collect us with its presence. Celebration by its nature requires engagement.

Whereas…convenience? Seriously? If convenience matters to us in more than a fleeting way, we’re in pretty bad shape as a society. Is this what really matters to us? While you could try to make a case that convenience is important precisely because it frees us to focus on more important things than our banking, you just can’t get all the way to “celebrating” it. Convenience doesn’t collect us together in an enriching common life, in fact, it arguably does the opposite. It permits us to be passive, disengaged, focused on ease. At a macro-level a culture that worships convenience can even be poison to feeling engaged and alive, because it facilitates consumption without connection that's emotionally and spiritually enriching. Thus, in an important respect, convenience is antithetical to celebrating the Christmas season. Christmas calls on us to be engaged, connected, mindful, generous and willing to work on things that matter. It’s a time to feel alive to the world and its spiritual, moral and material possibilities.

Here’s another thing that happened over the weekend. I was just a couple of blocks from home when one of my front tires gave out and the car lurched sickeningly to the right with a horrible crunch. I coaxed the car into the parking lot of a nearby grocery store and got out to inspect the damage. Flat as a pancake. I don’t have a mobile phone, so I went into the store to ask if someone could help me call the Automobile Association. Instead, the manager of the store came out to help me. He took a good look at the tire, opened the trunk to confirm there was a spare, shooed me and my children inside where it was warm and changed the tire himself in fifteen minutes flat. To thank him, I bought him a bottle of wine and a box of biscuits – small tokens of appreciation, not just for his help, but for the fact that he was willing to help in the first place. Not only did his generosity delight me, it has delighted everyone I’ve told this story to.

Getting the flat tire was inconvenient – it scuppered our day’s plans. But through that inconvenience, some delightful things happened. A generous act. A gift of thanks. A story. This is hardly a Christmas miracle the likes of the divine intervention of It’s a Wonderful Life, but it illustrates the potential of human kindness, which, as reflected in the season, is worth celebrating. Let’s hold those things dear, and keep convenience in its place.

She’d gone to bed fully prepared: coffee maker programmed for 4:45, purse and coat neatly by the door, alarm set for 5:00. She doubted that she’d need it, but it was always best to be sure. After all, it would be a disaster if she slept in. As she lay waiting to fall asleep, she ran through her plan one more time: put the coffee in the coffee mug, drive to Walmart, line up. Once she finally got inside, it would be first things first. The Sony Xbox was the priority, then the memory cards, the Christmas decorations and the photo-quality printer paper. Her heart fluttered in her chest. She’d need to be fast if she was going to get her share before things ran out. Or –she swallowed, mouth dry in the darkness – or if things got really desperate, she could use the pepper spray. It was in her purse: she’d carried it ever since that fright from the man in the parking lot in 2009. She didn’t want to use it, but she needed the Xbox. She deserved it. She’d missed out last year because some rough man with a red face had pushed her out of the way, and she’d watched him triumphantly carry off the last one as she picked herself up off the floor. She’d been lucky she hadn’t been trampled! And the year before, she’d missed out on a flat screen TV when a whole family had surrounded the shelf, loading up on them and stopping anyone else from getting near. She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t going to let that happen again. This time she was ready for whatever came her way. OK. The above is the stuff of Sunday-afternoon fantasy. But how is one to make sense of the fact that an as-yet-unidentified woman pepper sprayed other shoppers at a Walmart in Los Angeles this week while trying to take advantage of the “Black Friday” sales? It’s possible, I suppose, that she crowds simply made her panic, and she loosed the pepper spray to get some breathing room…and then just happened to use the opening to spirit away an Xbox. But violence at the sales elsewhere in the States suggests that, though extreme, the pepper spray incident was part and parcel of an “anything it takes” attitude towards securing one’s deals.

For a self-confessed non-shopper of a Canadian who spent Friday working, driving my children back and forth to school and making tomato soup, the Black Friday mayhem is all a bit of a mystery. After hearing about it on the news, I first wondered if the mob scenes were representative of a sort of odd collective effervescence, but, although people can be heard to be laughing in some of the video footage available online, they do not seem to be acting with a collective mind. It’s actually kind of the opposite: it’s highly individualist, with just a whole lot of people desperately trying to do their own thing, and to grab their own deal.

While I’m not proud of it, my first reaction was a sort of smug, “Tut, tut…look how greedy and foolish those people are.” But if you look at the shoppers’ faces, they’re just ordinary people, not some caricature specimens of homo greedus. They have a day off. They want to prepare for Christmas. It’s fun –usually - to participate in a shared event. It feels fabulous to score a deal.

In fact, if you think about it, the shoppers are acting in a perfectly rational way considering the world in which we live. It’s one in which an extraordinary amount of human creativity is devoted to fetishizing desire in the form of marketing. In which wanting and buying are hailed as civic virtues. In which shopping is billed as “fun”. In which the over-riding message is that it’s what you have rather than what you do that makes life worth living.

The poignant thing for me, and I dare say many other observers, is that Black Friday is part of American Thanksgiving. My perception of American Thanksgiving is that it’s the most widely-shared holiday, a time to gather, feast, perform family rituals…and yes, to give thanks. Giving thanks for what you have seems far away from pepper spraying or trampling people to get more stuff, even if you intend to gift that stuff onwards. This is not said in a spirit of sanctimoniousness; it’s just an observation on the irony of it all.

After the euphoria of the deal…what next? I suppose the delight of seeing a happy face as someone unwraps their X-box on Christmas morning, and knowing that you earned that delight through your Black Friday efforts. But I can’t help wondering whether the pepper spray would be likelier to stay in the purse if we valorized gratitude to the same degree we did acquisition, and if we put our creativity and passion to use, not to whip up desire, but for thanks.

I was thinking how this could play out. What if the Friday after Thanksgiving was used for a different kind of thanksgiving, where you thought of something in your life that made it special, and devoted your thanks to it? It could be music. It could be the beating heart in your child’s chest. It could be your little garden. It could be your library. What if you gave thanks by giving that thing time and attention, or helped others to have something of the same? What feelings would that create? How long would that last? How could you make it a gift?