By Daniel Pryzbyla Columnist EdNews.org

You can't say we weren't warned ahead of time. A Gallup Poll of adults November 27-29, before the "holiday season" began, highlighted 2 issues. Was it "too stressful," and was it "too commercialized." A whopping 85% said it was "too commercialized;" an overwhelming 77% of answered "too stressful." Yuk!

"So a holiday that began in ancient times as a debauched escape from everyday chores," wrote Associated Press writer Matt Crenson in his accompanying story "has become exactly the opposite – a frenzied season full of expectations, obligations and stress."

To assure residents that Santa's leftovers wouldn't spill into the streets or alleys during the holiday season, the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin announced its sanitation department would be working the weekdays while its regular employees would celebrate the extended holiday weekend's vacations. The city department of revenue would also be open for property owners to pay their taxes before the December 31 deadline for deductions on state and federal tax forms. First things first during holiday season for some cities – garbage and taxes.

Other cities and states had bigger problems than garbage and tax deadlines. For those living or stranded by the horrific blizzards in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Nebraska and the Texas panhandle – this would be a "holiday season" they'd soon want to forget – along with any pre-holiday Gallup Poll tabulations. "Too stressful" would be too mild a category to even consider. Stranger than fiction, while snow was piling up out west, back in Milwaukee a couple county park golf courses were even opened during the balmy and very unusual sunny 50-degree holiday season. An astute neighborhood student asked, "Will their students be able to have the holiday vacation later?" Hmm. Maybe Gallup could poll her query too.

So, were you part of the minority who passed your "new year's" resolutions last year not to get caught up in "commercialism" or being "stressed out" this time around? If so, bravo! Of course, on the other side of the season's ledger are the merchants who do 40 percent of their annual sales leading up to the "holiday season." Goodness gracious, how does the country's 90 percent religious clout allow Scrooge to pull off these schemes year after year? Some parents complain, and rightfully so, that kids are demanding happy holidays throughout the year. "By the time the righteous holiday arrives, they've already loaded up with 'must-have-now' gifts the past 11 months!" If grandma and/or grandpa came over, don't be surprised if you saw them curled up in a corner like they were in shock. They were just overwhelmed, multiplied by 10. Hopefully, you bought enough wine. Otherwise, you might have been saddled with non-stop, "When I was a kid, we only got……etc."

For some of us in the lower percentage of the poll, it was a good time to catch up on some reading and re-reading – in addition to "pretend" shopping. To insure success with this, leave money and credit cards at home. It's no surprise technology gadgetry continues to dominate the shopping season's senses and pocketbooks. HDTV – "high definition" flat-screen sales are increasing because broadcasters are switching off analogue broadcasts in February 2008. Making the rounds visiting stores of 2 major TV sales operatives was quite an experience of HDTV ignorance. One thing stood out. Testosterone ruled. Although dozens of the holiday shoppers were of sexes and age differential, the sales reps were overwhelmingly white males, mostly about 30 years of age and under. While shopping during the mid-afternoon weekends each time, testosterone trumped again. Almost every TV in each store visited was tuned to a football game – the same one depending on the store visited. This provided male shoppers a continuous play-by-play account of the game no matter which HDTV they were surveying.

Male sales reps, especially if they were working on "commission" would sort testosterone customers via a few "techie" inquiries. If some answered with a shrug, it suggested DA – "Dark Ages" customer. Some people already have "flat screen" TV, but these are not technically "digital" or HDTV. However, males having done some educational research and blurting a couple code words like "plasma" or "LCD" received further attention.

In general, the very large flat-screens called "plasma" screens are hung on walls, whereas HDTV with "smaller" screens up to 42 inches or so are LCD or "liquid crystal display" flat-screens placed on regular TV stands. Information doesn't always assume sales are based only on knowing HDTV facts. Similar to cars, there are few who would deny they went looking for a particular car and model and ended up buying something quite different – even if they were car mechanics. Of course, "price" always plays a final role making a decision – even when you're a "pretend" holiday shopper. With prices starting at the "high end" already, you get the feeling capitalism's TV global marketplace (Most brands you'll notice are made in Japan and Korea.) is replaying its original theme song, "Let the buyer beware." Will these be outdated in 3 years, too?

For some trying to keep the holidays less stressful and commercialized, it's also less expensive to buy a book. Continuing along the technology trail and assuming you're not an anti-French fanatic, "Google – and the myth of universal knowledge" by Jean-Noël Jeanneney and translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan is a real gem. Originally published in 2005 in France, his short 92-page hardcover has been published in English by University of Chicago Press Ltd., London, in "2007" but hit the bookstores earlier. Don't get uptight about the title; the book is focused on the specific literary Google project called "Google Book Search."

When available and noteworthy, most readers find comments of praise informative on a book jacket to get a brief concept of a book. Jeanneney is the distinguished president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Michael Gorman, Dean of Library Sciences, California State University, Fresno, and immediate past president of the American Library Association, shared Jeanneney's legitimate concerns about the Google project. "He questions the value of what he rightly calls an 'indeterminate, disorganized, unclassified, uninventoried profusion' – the inevitable result of the massive digitization of millions of books from major research libraries to provide the database for Google's free-text searching."

The Financial Times newspaper noted, "The president of the French national library has made himself the frontman in what he sees as a struggle to save cultural diversity. In the postmodern world, the battleground is the internet. Here, search engines determine what tomorrow's generations will click on, learn and think."

In his "forward" to the book, Ian E. Wilson, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, pointed out reinforcement of Jeanneney's UNESCO concerns. "Over the past few years," said Wilson, "political leaders in charge of cultural policy have been developing a cultural response to the tendencies of the global economy. This debate has been largely ignored in the Anglophone world, secure in the dominance of the English language and cultural paradigm. In the United States, the issue was seen as affecting Hollywood and the entertainment industry." Librarians and archivists were not active in the debates leading to the UNESCO declaration, Wilson said, "but its principles and approaches have considerable relevance to their thinking on the global information infrastructure."

"The internet," asserts Jeanneney, "was not born of an ever-fecund capitalism but from the combination of military interests and 'academic' imaginations. Then, in the early 1990s on our own continent, the work of CERN, under the impetus of a Briton, Tim Berners-Lee, and without a commercial objective in immediate view, succeeded in establishing the World Wide Web. Even Google, which nevertheless seems to embody the energy of the market alone, was born in 1998 at Stanford University in California, where Brin and Page were students in computer science," noted the author. "Initially, it received federal funding, notably from the National Science Foundation and the Digital Library Initiative. This too is often forgotten: it was only later, when the business became profitable, that it centered its development on profits, with the support of venture capital."

"One of the weaknesses of Google's project," the French librarian president said, "is its apparent indifference to the question of long-term preservation and conservation. This too is an effect of the speed implicit in the project's commercial nature. The return on investment must be fast at all costs (and getting a seat on the Big Board won't encourage Google to concentrate on long-term archiving). As internet subscribers already know, retrieving some archives can become a costly issue.