I suspect my wife, like many overachievers, dislikes Christmas because she feels likely to fail some non-existent competition to meet impossible expectations, a contest on which, if it existed, all mere mortals would underperform. So, her ideal December would be to get as far away from tinsel, carols and the holiday as possible, preferably to a country that has never heard of Christmas.

I was probably inoculated against this nonsense by my father on the one hand, who had little interest in material things and always expected the same gifts — a few new pairs of socks and a small drugstore box or chocolate/pecan turtles, and by my mother and grandmother, on the other hand, who turned Christmas into a fraught contest for not just approval but supremacy.

For my part, I’ve always liked the sentimental dream of Christmas embodied in old movies from a simpler, less cynical time than my own — “Holiday Inn,” Remember the Night,” “Christmas in Connecticut,” “Pocketful of Miracles,” “Meet Me in St. Louis,” and even the throwback “Love, Actually.”

And I like giving gifts if I can figure out something the giftee would really enjoy but might not buy for themselves. I have far less enthusiasm for the rote fulfilling of the obligation to give something, anything, to people you may not even like that they probably don’t want just for the sake of form.

And if you don’t believe in the deus ex machina rescue of Easter, the story of the baby Jesus is pretty depressing — one more idealist-in-the-making doomed to be done in by the powers that be, who intend to stay in power by any means necessary. But, of course, religion hardly enters into our observances. As Daniel Boorstin wrote in “The Americans: The Democratic Experience,” Christmas has become just one of several “festivals of consumption,” contrived by our commercial civilization to keep the economy spinning.

To the Puritans, according to Boorstin, gaudy celebrations of Christmas were “a menace to the pure Christian spirit.” And it “remained a simple folk holiday” for the next two hundred years until, after the Civil War, a burgeoning industrial age changed the face of America. Christmas began to turn into an excuse to consume, abetted by Santa, caroling, department stores, mail order catalogs, the need to buy decorations, trees, presents, wrapping paper, Christmas cards, and to run up debt.

The best estimates for this year suggest we will spend $700 billion, an average of a month’s paycheck per person. Since we won’t quit eating and paying rent for a month, this will either have to come from savings or additional debt.

Has it all gone too far? You bet. When TV commercials suggest you ought to buy his and hers automobiles for Christmas, you can’t help but feel inadequate. Of course this sort of purchase, like major appliances, furniture and so forth, are actually things you would buy anyway, you just slap a bow on them to make a necessity into a celebration. Of course, the joy comes to a shuddering halt in the new year when the monthly bills begin to appear.

Not only is it all too much, it is too soon. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade may have been contrived to kick off the Christmas season, but nobody where I grew up ran out to shop anytime soon. My Dad used to stop, on the way home from work every Christmas Eve, at the Marshall Drug Store on the corner to buy my Mom the annual bottle of cologne . This year, I noticed the Christmas merchandise began to elbow aside the Halloween costumes and candy corn a week or more before the trick or treating began. For shame!

Of course, poor postal carriers have already been appearing for weeks with backs bowed under the weight of endless catalogs — for clothes, candy, trinkets, tools, toys, and a thousand other things I neither want nor need. Apparently the algorithms that target junk mail at likely prospects have a glitch when it comes to my house. The glossy pitches for stuff that slide through my mail slot slide without any intermediate stop into the recycling bin.

Black Friday was an unpleasant enough innovation, shaming families gathered for the turkey to dump each other at dawn the next day and head for the mall. Now it begins before Friday and extends through the weekend. Soon it bumps into CyberMonday where tech retailers, largely online, try to get their virtual hands in your pockets.

In between there comes poor, outmanned, outgunned Small Business Saturday, an attempt to allow little local stores with unique goods a chance to peddle their wares before their customers have spent themselves into bankruptcy. There is a certain whiff of shaming, too, in the effort to make you abandon the chain stores and the big boxes for poor Mom and Pop shops.

Giving Tuesday is even more shameless about shaming you, but this time at least it tries to get you to do unto others after you have spent five frenzied days doing unto yourself. So we are solicited to contribute to our begging Alma Mater, for contributions to cure scary diseases, familiar and obscure. We are urged to Save the Children, wildlife, whales, ducks, the planet, to pony up for Public TV and other causes it seems to me my tax dollars would be providing for if I lived in a blue state.

Maybe we need a “leave me alone” Wednesday or “quit trying to get me to buy things” Thursday. After so much high pressure sales talk, by the time Christmas rolls around I am fed up with the whole idea of Christmas. It may be that I am about ready to agree to join my wife somewhere distant enough and so thoroughly off the grid as to be unfamiliar with tinsel, presents, carols, and credit cards.

But where would that be? Tibet? Antarctica? The Moon? Barsoom? Probably even it is equipped by now with a wifi connection to Amazon and the piped in sound of Bing singing “White Christmas.” Better to lock the door, unplug the TV, and pull the covers over our heads until January 1, 2019. We may have no presents to show for the season, but our MasterCard statement will be a joy to behold and our blood pressure at a holly, jolly low.