$PIRIT OF THE $EASON: HOLIDAY SPENDING MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND ...

Byline: MARIEL GARZA

THERE'S something profoundly disturbing about the Christmas shopping season, particularly the length to which people will go to buy junk they don't need.

When it seems like a good idea to spend a winter night camped out in the Best Buy parking lot to buy a video-game console for $500, it's a sign that consumerism has become less of a pastime and more of a way of life.

It is this kind of excess that has driven my family to cut Christmas gift-giving a bit each year. We are now down -- over my brother's protestations -- to giving presents only to family members under 18, and there's only one of those so far.

Not only has this relieved the pressure of finding the right gift for the pickiest bunch of people ever assembled, but it has the added benefit of freeing up time and money for other important things in life, such as booze and lottery tickets. It also gives us the profound joy of feeling superior to the hordes of mindless consumers scrabbling over the last Shrek Chia Head at Rite-Aid.

But now I've come to realize this kind of irresponsible behavior could bring down the economy of Southern California, maybe even the world.

I put this concern to Los Angeles' favorite economist, Jack Kyser of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. He humored me while I spun a hypothetical scenario in which everyone suddenly decided to sit the Christmas shopping season out.

``It wouldn't be the end of the world,'' he said, reassuringly, then explained how it would, however, be the beginning of a very painful economic incident that would radiate out across the globe like an enormous atomic bomb of woe.

First you have to consider this sobering fact: Two-thirds of the nation's economy is retail-based, and a good chunk of that retailing happens during the holiday season, Kyser said. In Los Angeles County alone, the retail sector provides 416,500 jobs, and not all of them at The Gap and Wal-Mart. Last year, taxable retail sales were $92.3 billion, and about 28 percent of that happened during the holiday season.

If people said no to gifts for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day and the winter solstice, the first to feel the pinch would be the smaller stores. But it would not end there, Kyser said.

The buying drop-off would affect many obvious businesses, such as stores, Fed-Ex and UPS, but it would also have a ripple effect that could touch untold numbers of non-obvious businesses like decoration makers and trucking lines that move cartons of Sony PlayStation 3 consoles and Tickle Me Elmo Extreme dolls.

``People don't stop and think of all the linkages,'' Kyser said.

But now I can't stop thinking about the possible linkages, the what-ifs.

If people stopped the Christmas buying bonanza, then places like The Gap would be forced to lay off thousands of perky youngsters who, when turned down by Starbucks, would join gangs or Mary Kay. Hundreds of truckers, Christmas-tree farmers and tinsel-factory workers would lose their jobs. With less money, they would buy fewer DVDs, Big Macs and Hummers. People in those industries would start to get laid off, and they would buy less stuff and etc., etc., and so on. Thus a whole cycle of economic doom would ensue, ending, no doubt, in a deep depression.

If there isn't as much retail buying happening, then other industries will suffer as well. Think about L.A.'s port -- the busiest in the U.S. -- though which millions and millions of retail goods pass. China, Japan and Taiwan (the port's three biggest trading partners) would start to feel the hit in demand for their stuff and would start making less of it. That would cut jobs in factories, laying off thousands, maybe millions of workers. With no money to pay for things like food or booze or lottery tickets, the 1 billion people of China would get unruly. The governments would respond with crackdown and complete autocratic rule.

Meanwhile, the balance of world power would shift because Americans would be too busy illegally immigrating to Mexico and Central America to continue fighting terrorism in the Middle East. And Europeans would be too busy fighting off the rise of the newly reconstituted Soviet Union to care. Plus, there would probably be a bird flu plague.

Scared yet?

I am.

Who knew that the the people lining up for days to buy stuff aren't the doofi I thought. They are the heroes of our retail-based economy. They are the knights of Nintendo, the paladins of PlayStation. Without them, I could very well be living in a box under the freeway and speaking Chinese, which is really hard.

To stave off this almost possibly certain future, I will do my part this coming week to make up for my family's selfish behavior. And when those pesky collectors from MasterCard start bugging me a few months later, I will ignore them, snug in the knowledge that my buying binge might have made me a deadbeat, but I helped save the world as we know it.

And that, like the commercial says, is priceless.

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