Too much, too soon

Already they’ve started hawking Christmas wares. This is the first day of October! You’ll pardon my Grinch persona, but this early trading on the Spirit of Christmas does anything but inspire a festive mood. A TV ad on Oct. 4 with Bing Crosby wearing a wreath around his head singing the much-beloved White Christmas and all for only $12.98 plus shipping and handling does not give me a warm glow.

This early and offensive Christmas-theme commerce is linked intrinsically to the money god, not the Son of God. Christmas is a sacred celebration. The observance is gentle and quiet – full of the silence and serenity of awe. “He was known to be of humble estate,” the Scripture says. But where is the regard for the holiness of Christmas in this loud exploitation?

Celebration, of its very nature, implies waiting, anticipation, implies confining a particular focus to a particular time. Celebration also implies accomplishment. Things have to come to fulfillment before we celebrate them. Otherwise our celebration is empty, devoid of its reason for being.

My kids look forward to their birthdays, and rightly so. We do not, however, begin celebrating their birthdays three months in advance; nor do we emphasize the celebration until much closer to the date itself. We don’t want our children to be deprived of the celebration they deserve by causing it to be a vapid afterthought to a running hype.

I will grant that there is such a thing as the Christmas season. However, this ain’t it. We celebrate the harvest season during harvest season. We do not, however, celebrate bringing in sheaves in July! or June!

Frankly there is something decadent about beginning the Christmas celebration on the first of October. It’s an unfair assault on people’s sensibilities, and all this razzle-dazzle – particularly so soon – is a clear example of modern idolatry: the worship of money.

Sometimes I think that money has become the only real value in our society. If it has to do with money, people will take notice, act, be concerned. It’s the first good. Spiritual matters, affairs of conscience, issues of the heart and soul have become irrelevant, expendable – nice, but who cares? What matters is money. Money has become literally a god.

Merchants declare that if they don’t make it at Christmas, they don’t make it – and heads bow in sympathetic assent. Let the unbridled consumerism begin! No matter that people become numbed into indifference. No matter that the standard of right conscience is whether the right gift has been procured, indeed that the right number of gifts have been purchased. No matter that people become callous and frayed and pressured – Buy early! Buy here! Buy now! Buy more!

Does the Babe in Bethlehem desire that people incur unconscionable debt, panged by some materialistic guilt to give the very best somebody else’s money can buy? And what of gift receivers? Do we droop in disappointment if we don’t get enough, just what we wanted, just the right thing? I read the truth in my own heart. I feel the struggle. I’m not immune or above it all.

It is, of course, pointless to protest these proceedings. We have no defense save in the quiet place God gave each of us within. We know that retreat, but we forget about it sometimes – forget the sweetness and truth and light we have found there.

Giving is good, but a gush of extravagance is a distortion of that goodness. Receiving is a blessing, but tempered with anything but gratitude is an insult to that blessing. Celebration is natural, but unnatural if unrelenting and lacking fulfillment.

Pope John Paul II, in a message to the laity while in San Francisco, said that we will be a witness to Christ by the way we live and by the way we refuse to live. I refuse to allow Christmas to become an empty, giddy, hyperactive succession of weeks for me and my family. I opt to wait.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on October 18th, 1987