Puritan non-Christmas in the great city of the age.
Honestly taken aback after a few years in less commercialized societies. The greed spell isn't a good look for humanity, spiritually speaking. When the English theatre became commercical rather than courtly in the mid 16th c., there was an abundance of wealth on display. Greed was thought to be good, largely because it offered a power structure distinct from the monarchy and the aristocracy. (In fairness, the same principle made hand-wrought lace very popular.)
Anti-Catholicism had much to do with this as well. The ideal virtue was no longer that of the the poor and austere monk. Of course, there were some complications to this as well. The global orders in the church (OP, OFM, etc.), precisely because of their global presence and connection to Rome, were more closely linked to trade than many of the national churches. I grew up thinking that the commerce of the holiday was the secular error, while the church preserved the spiritual truth, but the reality was much more complicated. St Nick was a trader form the beginning, patron to the commercial interests after the translation of the relics to Bari. Christianity is a transactional faith, or at least more transactional than many of the others. As a result, there are modern hospitals, sanitation, and electrical service more often in these Christian trading nations, and many of the others look to them with envy.
But that's the culture, and I'm considering more the microcosm of the individual souls. Listening to these people, and watching them, I see the deformation that greed causes, the same greed that fuels the engines of commerce as they desire the latest goods. But in the case of the individual, the manner of living will not serve that individual when they have their existence within eternity rather than temporal progression. And basing the whole calculus on happiness and freedom of the marketplace has made for a very craven public discourse.
Happiness must have some connection to the things that are going on. If you are happy while there are bad things going on, you've simply shifted your perspective to include good things not presently in view. So to make personal happiness the goal of public policy means that there must be something going on that is, however loosely, associated with this condition of happiness. The usual way of describing the civic order is located in these things going on. America cuts to the chase, and says happiness is the good. But the difficulty is that it is possible for bad people to be happy when doing bad things.
I waver back and forth as to whether to categorize my experiences of recent years as political or not. Physically, the reality of daily life is often the equivalent of gulag life in the stories about other countries. I don't think that I will ever be able to explain the things that have happened to me, largely because my focus is on describing the way things are. When bad things happen, they simply get in the way, and I do my best to move past them as quickly as possible, rather then using them as fodder for the thought.
Ultimately, you must try to be good. The reason for that is that, even though there is a chance that good and bad are illusory, absolutely everything else outside of good and bad is inherently capable of being described in more than one way, and we can't be sure that we are riding the right horse, as William James (I think) had it. Although the mechanisms of industrial prosperity make for an abundance of goods, there are a lot of people leaving very difficult lives, and some of them are in places where one wouldn't think a difficult life was the order of the day. So you must think that you are doing good, and you must think that you are speaking the truth, or you will never be sure that you were even attempting to do the right thing.