ALTHOUGH THE HOLIDAY season finds Mammon at his most lively, and widely televised, other spirits – of good cheer, generosity, and kindness – are stirring too, if somewhat less splashily. The hoary cliché that it's better to give than to receive is true; there is a distinct pleasure in bestowing the well-placed and unexpected gift, the genuinely wanted item or experience whose cost, great or small, is not relevant. Honesty compels me to add that getting gifts isn't necessarily a dreadful experience, either; recently I became the delighted recipient of a pair of Bohemian brandy snifters, each the size of an acorn squash, blown from lead-free crystal, and a timely arrival for the enjoyment of holiday spirits. Brandy in its many, many iterations is warming on cold nights and sweet enough to lull the hounds of dessert back to sleep; served in spectacular snifters, it is also a conversation piece of sorts, an encouragement to sit around the table and leave the clearing of dishes until later, or the morrow.

It is tempting to think that Mammon should be banished from our hearts and minds for the six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's – perhaps sent out into the desert for 40 days? – since the relation of money culture, with all its clinking calculations, to the higher human aspirations of altruism and empathy is no better than strained and is more commonly antagonistic. If you are throwing some kind of holiday get-together, say, a party or an open house, you are missing the point if you spend a lot of time worrying about what it's going to cost. It's supposed to cost; that is central to the satisfaction of throwing it in the first place, and this is true even if you're a business. You cannot really assign an economic value, a number, to goodwill cultivated in prospective customers who are welcomed into a place of business – possibly a distillery – and made to feel that they are people, not walking wallets. Goodwill, like joy, empathy, and happiness, is an immaterial reality – a spirit, we might say – that cannot be fed into the crude, nickel-and-dime machinery of accountancy.

Mammon seems unbanishable from our lives in any case, and I do not advocate trying. The worship of money is an American tic more venerable than the celebration of Thanksgiving; it is part of our collective identity and it touches all of us, whether we accept, reject, deny, ignore it – or just wish someone would box Mammon's ears once in a while, pull a TV ad for some worthless article, or, one night, skip the consumer-spending report on the nightly news in favor of something more ... spirited.

Paul Reidinger

paulr@sfbg.com