The holiday season is fast approaching, with Christmas being its central feature. While Christmas is primarily a Christian religious festival celebrating the birth of Jesus, it has become the most economically significant holiday of the year.
Among its non-religious aspects, Christmas is associated with family and friends exchanging gifts and cards, stories and songs about Santa Claus, decorating trees, feasting, and other such activities. These things, in and of themselves, are not bad, except that they have caused this season to also become associated with busyness, greed, loneliness, and such negative effects of overindulgence as weight gain, drink-driving, family dysfunction, and the like. For some, therefore, Christmas is not a joyous time of year.
Christmas, however, is not the culprit; it is itself the victim of a deeper societal malaise. Richard Eckersley, in his 2004 book Well and Good, reports that “public attitude surveys suggest a deep tension between people’s professed values and the lifestyle promoted by modern Western societies”.1 As far as Christmas is concerned, this means that while people expect joy and peace at Christmas, the Christmas-machine serves them tension and strife.
The story of Christmas is the story of the birth of the Son of God. While this story is replete with the religious overtones of Christianity, it also serves as a story that embodies the hopes and dreams of all people in Australia.
The Christmas story inspires hope, peace, joy, and faith; in so doing this story also encourages us to love. These are qualities which, in some expression, all religions support. By describing God born as a human baby and living amongst the dirt and chaos of human life, this story elevates our daily lives to the status of being valued. Why would God become human if being human was yucky? Christmas, then, is a celebration of all that is good and reminds us of our fullest human potential.
Christmas is the kind of story-with-a-purpose that is taught to us when we are young. As children, we learn how to behave and ‘get along’ from our families and the community to which we belong. These rules for living are called virtues, and are “concerned with building and maintaining strong, harmonious personal relationships and social attachments, and the strength to endure adversity”.2
In contrast, political and marketing-machines reduce us to faceless consumers, isolated from the positive values and meaning that our community promotes. “Modern Western culture undermines, even reverses, traditional (or universal) values”.3
Consider that advertising subtly promotes the attitudes of “buy more” and “you are what you own”, which ultimately leave us feeling lonely and empty. We groan under this consumerism every year at Christmas. Am I wrong in thinking that we want to belong to a better society, rather than simply existing without meaning and value beyond our purchasing power? I want so much more for myself, don’t you?
We can together overcome the vices being foisted upon us by celebrating those stories that promote virtue and community solidarity. Christmas is our story, our holiday; it is not the tool of business. We make of it what we want and are willing to accept. In my family and church, we will remember the birth of the one who loves, trusts, and accepts us; a story that encourages us to be better than we are and strengthens communities.
[by Ian Forest-Jones, 26 October 2005]
