A Very Merry Giftmas (xo, Nietzsche)

In this episode of Sumi’s Existential Crisis, Sumi explains the real reason why we give children during Christmas. Is it still moral to give Christmas gifts? Join Sumi in thinking about capitalism, resentment, and Nietzsche this Christmas – and maybe find a few philosophical justifications to save a couple dollars and avoid getting your annoying baby cousins Christmas gifts anyways (they don’t even know what Christmas is yet!)

Reflection

The process of making the podcast was quite involved: I had to learn how to use Descript, I wrote a script for the podcast, I set up and interview with my friend, and I also had to do quite a bit of research, because I wanted to make sure that the article I was referencing was historically accurate. I read a little less than half the book The Battle for Christmas, and I of course had to brush up on Nietzsche and reread the relevant sections. However, beyond all of that work, I think that the biggest hurdle in creating the podcast was coming up with an idea in itself. Even though we have spent the whole year doing protocols similar to these ones, it suddenly felt like this podcast had to be perfect: the idea had to be good, interesting, applicable, and accurate, which was obviously quite challenging and stressful. Once I came up with the idea, writing the podcast was initially quite easy, until I had to introduce the philosophy. Although I think that the model for my podcast had the history and philosophy in different segments of the podcast, I tried to transition back and forth as much as I could — it was difficult to go deep into a topic when every couple of sentences, you have to make sure that you’re still talking about the holidays. However, after many rounds of revision, I am quite happy with my podcast. 

Podcast Outline

Introduction:

• Start with clips from different holiday advertisements
• Talk about my own Christmas traditions

Interview:

• Interview with Aiden (PO ’25) about his Christmas traditions.

History

• Christmas gift-giving to children originated from upper and middle-class anxiety about commercial capitalism and class distinctions.

Introducing Philosophy:

• Ideas from Frederich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals are present in this history
• Explain how slave morality and master morality are both present in the history

Connecting it back…

• Who is at fault? Is there a moral and an immoral party?