Christmas Contest

This year’s skirmish about the real meaning of Christmas is underway.  One politician tweeted about a tinseled conifer tree, insisting “This is not a holiday tree.  It’s a Christmas tree”.  Recently, a downtown parade became a hot internet issue when the Mayor wanted it to be a “Winter Parade” rather than a “Christmas Parade.”  The typical reaction was; “The new mayor needs to be voted out if she does away with the Christmas parade; Christmas is all about Christ, and not some winter parade.”  We sometimes hear that the correct form is not “Seasons Greetings”, but rather “Merry Christmas”.

However, it could be said that the meaning of Christmas was somewhat already lost to big retail consumerism.  Once, Christmas was a 12-day feast that began with Christmas Eve and ended at Epiphany on Jan. 6.  In the days prior, the church traditionally observed “Advent”, as a time of preparation and reflection that included the four Sundays before Christmas.

In the 19th century, through the popularity of literary works like Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” by Clement Clarke Moore, and the Coca Cola Santa depiction, Christmas formed its secularized tradition.  Yet without strongly established norms of tradition, a quiet but real battle ensued over the activities of the Season.  The victors were the merchants and not the believers.

Canadians and Americans now don’t observe the traditional Christian feast of 12 days, but a “retail Christmas” that perhaps begins on Black Friday sales day, and ends on Christmas Eve.  The weapons of that war in the 1930s and 1940s were seemingly innocent — “Holiday Music”, the “Miracle on 34th Street” movie — and cultural manipulations by capitalism that mixed the life-affirming values of family, community and gift-giving, with the practice of unfettered commercial consumption.  How insidious and how brilliant to persuade us that belief in the magic of Christmas was itself a kind of faith — a faith whose penitential practice was guilt for not buying the right presents or enough of them, and whose sacraments came as licensed carbonated beverages and name branded consumer goods.

So that contest was won and lost, and Christians, who by rights would be observing the penitential season of Advent now and not trimming trees or sipping eggnog, were not the winners.  The two feasts both called “Christmas” don’t actually overlap; one begins just as the other ends.  “Retail Christmas” begins by eviscerating Thanksgiving the very day after.  Black Friday sales are the solemn ritualization of not being thankful at all, and solemnly affirms that neither we nor anyone else have what we need, and can’t be thankful.  Then it goads us into the shopping period that follows, which remarkably stops on Christmas Eve, right when the traditional original Christmas actually began.  When the shopping is done, “Store-bought Christmas” is done. Homo mercantilis — commercial humanity — has reached its climax at Christmas Eve and rests in glory.

What of the conflict on Christmas then?  What were the complaining and outraged citizens really saying?  For Christians today, Advent could again be a time of anticipation and of preparation.  Not to celebrate what has been won, or to defend the mere memory of Christian cultural dominance, but to ponder what has been lost and needs to be found again.  Counting the calendar differently will not save us from the vortex of mindless consumption by itself, but could be a sign of some resistance.

It’s not a time to be self-righteous.  We need not refuse or scorn all that the world celebrates in this holiday season, whether or not it places the name “Christmas” on it.  It is a season to share hospitality, to welcome and be welcomed, without insisting that our name or brand defines or shapes the act.  So too, when it is time for celebration and gifts, it is a season to share what we have with the poor, to consider the labour that made the objects we may give, or how they have impacted the fragile Earth.  “Immanuel” God with us, needs to be rediscovered.

It is not a bad thing to realize how alienated Christians have become from this season that appropriated Jesus, who, after all was born in occupied territory too.  People anticipate Jesus’ coming at this time of year, not because we need something additional in our overfilled lives, but because we need something quite different, either from the seasonal excesses or from the Christian pretensions of what now passes as Christmas.  People of faith know they need to be freed from sin, from suffering, and from oppression; they may even need Jesus to free them from commercial Christmas.  God's love for us is the example for us to love our neighbour, and that is Christmas.

Significantly based on an article by Andrew McGowan, Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, a historian of early Christianity, and a priest of the Anglican Communion.