“Omigod, Brianna, my neighbours have an inverted Christmas tree just like this one! Who do they think they are?””I know. Some people just try to be different for the sake of being different. It’s totally stupid.”
“Seriously.”
Ah, the Christmas season and the critics it inevitably spawns… You overhear them in the shops (much like I did in the case above); you go to grab a coffee on your lunch-break only to find yourself in the middle of an argument as to whether or not it is actually OK to buy one’s children iPods when there’s a war going on in Iraq, etc. And when talk of war dries up, people will go on to debate whether or not a Christmas ornament featuring Homer Simpson and a giant bottle of Duff Beer is in poor taste or not, and be just as grave and serious about it.
Its a Wonderful Life movie It seems to me that Americans are forever divided over the holiday season: either we are out at 5:30 a.m., eagerly waiting for that ornament sale to start, or we’re rolling our eyes at the neighbours’ outlandish decorations and dumping liters of rum into that eggnog, just to keep ourselves from killing someone after the 100th time we hear “Little Drummer Boy.”
We debate spirituality and materialism, various churches and recipes, paganism and Saviour-ism. Last year, the conservative media came up with a catchy phrase – “The War on Christmas” -meant to highlight the way in which the “pinkos and the homos and the witches” want to destroy proud Christian tradition in this great nation of ours. But the truth of the matter is – Christmas, and winter holidays in general, have always meant different things for different people. Even modern-day pagans complain about how their Winter Solstice was hijacked by Christianity all those years ago. The lost Golden Age of Christmas that evangelicals want us to turn back to never existed in the first place.
Best of the Best 4: Without Warning psp
And then there are the continued discussions concerning the lost “spirit” of the season, and how this is, supposedly, a modern phenomenon. The capitalist appropriation of the gift giving ritual has debased the holiday, erasing the “spirit” and replacing it with “spending” – all in the last few decades, apparently!
Yet perhaps there is nothing new about the commercialization of religious holidays. The concept did not arise out of a vacuum, and the evil corporations are not necessarily the first to exploit this phenomenon. The Christmas celebrations of centuries past were not bereft of materialist pursuits, as Ebenezer Scrooge would attest. Even the Three Magi did not show up to worship the baby Jesus empty-handed, as the Bible claims. And the pagan predecessors of Christmas – Saturnalia, Brumalia, etc. – included gift giving.
While no international conglomerate was charging tax on the myrrh offered to Jesus, for example, the actual ritual has remained, in many ways, the same. It has its negative aspects and its positive ones. It is not “evil,” but neither is it problem-free, especially when thousands of people, it seems, begin treating their holiday shopping list as some sort of status symbol. Discourse on the commercial aspects of Christmas is needed, but an in-depth, economically literate approach would be best. Shrill diatribes on why all Christmas shoppers ought to be drawn and quartered are getting just a little bit trite at this point in our capitalist history.
Most people will agree that, on Christmas, while the world’s elite roasts the goose and trades the aforementioned iPods, other people are busy starving and suffering and this is, indeed, unseemly. Problem is: the ideas on fixing the situation vary wildly. Do we take a sledgehammer to the economy, or do we try to revolutionize it? Christmas, perhaps more so than other times of year, brings such questions into sharper focus with its contrast of goodwill and rabid expenditure. The economics of the holiday season are a fascinating subject – not just for pundits and academics, but for all of the revelers.
It is my belief that, whether or not one can reconcile capitalism with Christianity in the end, this season is what you make it. The holidays do not belong to anyone in particular, no matter how many people will argue otherwise (and they will, on FOX News and AM radio, and everywhere else they can manage to get a word in). This is the way it’s always been, even during the days when Christmas was an official, even mandatory occasion.
When it comes to the magic of this season, people’s hearts react to it differently. The winter festivities can be about the birth of a Saviour, it can be about the beauty and terror of winter, a season of excitement, or reflection, or crowded malls, or combating irresponsible consumption, or drunken French-kissing under the mistletoe in full view of the relatives.
So Happy Holidays to you, and may you make the best of them, if you so choose. I, for example, hope to see my family this Christmas. The rest is mere window dressing – attractive as it is.