BUI: Buying Under the Influence During the Christ-less Christmas
Every year Christians get pressured, herded, coaxed, and cajoled into the same thing. And our blood commercialism level ends up being at least three times the moral limit. If we really want to “put Christ back in Christmas,” we might actually have to take Christmas out of the GDP and be comfortable with it.
There’s nothing wrong with capitalism, of course. I’m a big fan of it, and it beats communism in spades. It’s just that when it causes the Christmas Season to metamorphose into the Shopping Season, with its pre- and post-sales ranging nearly from the summer solstice to the vernal equinox, it might be time for us to downsize a bit. You know, like cutting back from a department store to a manger.
First, let us address the spending (or in many cases, over-spending) issue. Too many Americans each year are spending what amounts to a definable portion of their net worth on Christmas presents. And very, very little of that prepares us to receive the Baby Jesus. The pressure to spend big has been accepted by average income earners as a societal obligation not to be shirked, lest one be marked as cheap or unthoughtful. And even the well-heeled cannot escape the trap set for them by retailers, for they too are pressured. Only in their case it is the pressure of temptation – specifically, the temptation to impress. Unfortunately, if you have money – and there’s nothing wrong with that – those who sell stuff will seek strenuously for ways to separate you from it. Retailers cannot pry it from you with “visions of sugar-plums,” but they do seem to have perennial success using visions of others’ bedazzlement over your heeding your children’s visions of Burberry and BMW.
Now let’s take a look from a broad perspective at what commercialism does to the Christmas Spirit. Christmas profiteers cleverly seek to take the real focus out of Christmas. It is like removing the crosshairs from a rifle scope. Instead of using an economy of rounds to hit a selected target, you end up using a few boxes of ammo to hit everything but the target. That’s what retailers hope to achieve by taking Christ out of Christmas. They want you to spend your money on as much ammo as possible by keeping you off target for as long as possible. To put it simply, if we zero in on that manger for too long, we might juxtapose its austere environment with our gross spending (part accounting term, part moral reflection) and come up all confused and questioning. Those who have co-opted Christmas cannot live with that – not those who run Madison Avenue, nor Wall Street, and especially not those who run China’s tenebrous sweat shops.
So I’ll come to the point of how they do it. Nearing Christmas, the myriad television commercials for retail products hit us right, left, and dead center of mass. They patronize us as savvy shoppers out of one side of their mouth while out of the other tricking us into questioning our own intelligence for not grabbing a sale that only a fool could miss. Then, they unctuously blackmail us into fearing our child’s heartbreak at seeing their peers’ flaunting the “most popular toy of the Christmas Season” that they did not receive because mommy and daddy, due to something they could not understand at their age, prudentially would not rob their college fund.
All right, time to look at how we can spot it. Uniformity is the key, so look for it. Remember the Mao Suits everyone in China was wearing a few years back? Heck, you were “OK” if you wore one. Nobody questioned you. Now today, if all the children are playing with the same hugely popular toy on Christmas Day, they’re “OK” too – that is, “happy.” Is that really what defines happiness? Then there is the most powerful form of uniformity, that which is synthesized by Hollywood’s mad scientists of mass appeal. Ever notice how every TV series and made-for-TV Christmas special pushes a theme that references every sort of mood but one centered on the Baby Jesus? We’ve been bombarded by every kind of Christ-uninclusive reference (e.g., “the Christmas feeling,” the “Holiday Season,” the “time for family,” etc). They’ve brought us to the point that we might as well just invoke Obi-Wan’s Force description: “It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together.” That’s sounds great. The only problem is that it reduces Christmas to just this amorphous, everyone-define-it-as-they-wish, endless-scroll-of-a-shopping-list-dominated, so-called feel good season. I’m pretty sure that has nothing to do with Jesus.
Problem Solved
If we Christians can just bring ourselves to remembering and firmly resolving that Jesus is the real gift of Christmas, then any gift giving to one another should manifest itself no more than symbolically. That is, the giving of reasonable, frugal gifts to one another will still serve to celebrate yet under-shadow the real gift of Christmas, that of Christ. Let the profiteers attempt to over over-shadow Christ all they like. They do not control us. It is up to us to keep the crosshairs on the target. Please, keep your dominant eye on the Only Begotten Son of God and your pocketbook on your children’s college fund. That is the best way to keep Christ in Christmas.
