Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.

This line comes from Dave Barry’s annual holiday-season humor writing, in which he satirizes American Christmas culture—especially the way commercial shopping rituals overtake the season’s religious or spiritual meanings. Barry frequently framed the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas as a kind of national frenzy centered on malls, gift-buying, and consumer “traditions,” and he used mock-solemn language to mimic sermons or civic proclamations. The joke depends on the familiar late-20th-century scene of crowded malls and holiday retail pressure, treating mall-going as the real shared observance that unites people regardless of faith.

Barry’s line is a satirical jab at the commercialization of Christmas and the broader “holiday season.” By calling it a “deeply religious time” and then immediately redefining the shared ritual as shopping—“going to the mall of his choice”—he highlights the gap between the season’s spiritual ideals and the consumer habits that often dominate it. The phrasing mimics the solemn tone of a public proclamation, which makes the punchline sharper: modern devotion is redirected toward retail. The joke also nods to individualism (“each of us observes, in his own way”) while implying that, in practice, those “ways” converge in the same consumer marketplace.