“We are the city whose brightness blots the stars from night.”

— Frank Bidart

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, so this year I decided I would attempt change before the year is over. The problem is, I’m a slow learner, because the change I’m working on has been in the making for almost 13 years.

Since my daughter’s birth, I have gone back and forth in my struggle against everything born of consumerism, including my own desires. And since my daughter’s birth, I have lost far more battles than I have won. Nearly 13 years of rearing her in a culture driven by acquisition has taught me there are better ways of being an example than railing against — how does the bumper sticker put it? — “the dominant paradigm.”

And since I cannot bring myself to embrace that paradigm and still look my child in the eye, this holiday season I attempted to at least accept and maybe understand the consumer culture. My attempt was somewhat successful, taking the same form that it does at church, faculty meetings, and other large gatherings in which my social ineptitude overwhelms me — that is, I pretend I am an anthropologist from another planet studying the ways of an exotic, unlikely, and probably doomed tribe. The anthropologist exercise is one I learned from a women’s magazine in a doctor’s office years ago, and I have used it off and on ever since. It works especially well for someone like me — skeptical and introverted — because it allows me just enough detachment to function (mostly) without cynicism.

In the most recent employment of the anthropologist exercise in my acceptance and comprehension campaign, my husband and I were on one of our twice-yearly pilgrimages to the Asheville Mall. We predictably went on the last weekend before Christmas. Since the most important part of the exercise (according to the wise writer in the women’s magazine) is to simply notice your surroundings, and since my husband and I have been married long enough to enjoy the long silences between us, standing with him in a long line in a store gave me plenty of time and space to observe. In front of us was a woman about my age. Clearly not one to waste energy struggling against cultural mores concerning our sex, she was carefully made up and carefully dressed, her fingernails perfect red ovals, her coif the flawless result of process and “product,” her figure that of one who spends hours in a gym. I recognized her as the kind of woman for whom I feel a pathological combination of contempt and envy, and I realized I would have to limit my exercise to people about whom I could maintain some objectivity if I were to gain any understanding.

So I moved on in my observations, glancing behind me to a boy in his late teens, just young enough to escape embarrassment at the fact that he was attired as if he were a model for the store’s merchandise. His face was studiedly noncommittal, his $100 jeans at the right degree of bagginess, his colorful boxers showing just enough to reveal the brand name. Behind him were two more women about my age, both tired, both out of their element, both with armloads of clothing, both probably hoping to please their own disaffected youths just as their parents had once tried to please them. On the wall behind us hung a large screen television on which MTV videos alternated steadily with the store’s advertisements.

There were no notable differences in the two; in both, attractive, clean young people of different races lip-synced songs in which words like “want” and “need” figured prominently, lines such as, “Why is it always you want something you can never have,” “Give her what she wants,” and “Some great need in me starts to bleed.”

When I first took note of the lyrics, my guess was that they were carefully chosen to influence people to buy more. But when I thought about them, I realized that in creating that effect, the primary feeling they conveyed was discontent. Every song was angst driven, and that led me to a glimmering of empathy for the trend-conscious kid behind me who was doing free advertising. He still believed the easy formula that the ads told him — the right clothes and the right music are the best tools for building happiness, the best weapons against despair.

Of course, I didn’t need much to help me empathize with the older women, since the lines on their faces and their last season’s fashions told me plenty about what it’s like to stand in their shoes. The biggest part of them had quit believing in the culture of advertisements a long time ago, but some tiny part of them, like some tiny part of me, still held on to the possibility that things could ever be that easy. As for the perfect woman, well, she was so wholly a representative of what I was trying to understand and so much a departure from everything I wanted for my daughter, that she was, for the moment, too much to take in, too much to deconstruct. I would have to save her for the drive home, after my husband and I restored our Christmas spirits with a bracing dose of downtown Asheville’s alternative cheer and microbrew.

Back in the car on I-40 West, we were among the many cars headed out of town laden with packages. As we headed off Exit 27 and past Waynesville, the mountains around us glowed with Christmas lights. I thought of the anecdote my husband told me about the family that had to take down their hundred-thousand-dollar light display after a neighbor complained about the brightness of their lights, and how the following year they had their revenge by erecting an enormous grinch that pointed in his direction.

But maybe he wasn’t a grinch. Maybe he was just someone who wanted to be able to see the stars. And maybe the light display family was among those who simply know how to enjoy themselves without having to make an issue out of everything, or play ridiculous anthropologist head games with themselves just to get through another holiday season intact.

In any case, I want to be able to see the world my daughter will inherit through the eyes of those who like buying things, who like wildly colorful light displays, who take pleasure in a trip to a shopping mall, who feel no conflict at having their nails done weekly. Maybe believing that happiness results from buying things is no different than believing in immaculate conception or that anyone keeps New Year’s resolutions. Maybe all it takes are equal parts faith and hope. Faith and hope twinkle at me from every house as we enter our own neighborhood. The lights my husband strings through the dogwoods illuminate our house, making it look like a perfect storybook home. And at least for the moment, I’m all right knowing that what we believe in has little to do with reality, and everything to do with what we need.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young is a writer and teacher who lives in Cullowhee. She can be reached at playboat9@aol.com.)