What Happened to Christmas?
A friend of mine was remarking the other day that people are increasingly irritable during Christmas, and that it doesn’t seem that all the “Merry Christmas!” and “Happy Holidays!” remarks in the world makes them any happier. My own theory on why this has come to be is that Christmas has become a symbol of greed rather than the symbol of hope it was originally intended to be. It’s no longer Christmas, but “Commercialmas.”
Christmas has gotten too commercial, and as a result has lost its spiritual aspect for most people. It’s become so blatant, with articles in the newspapers talking of how retailers are hoping to make up for poor sales during the earlier part of the year by making massive profits during the “Christmas selling season” that we’ve become numbed to the crass, cheap obviousness of it all. People are irritable at Christmas because they're spending money they don't have on things the people they're buying for don't need. Everyone forgets that this is supposed to be a celebration of the birth of Christ (even though it's not His actual birthday, but an early Christian appropriation of the pagan Yuletide celebration). Given the rampant materialism that sweeps this country every year at this time, it's no wonder the spiritualism has gone out of it.
Christmas gifts, if they have to be bought, should be limited to children. But do we really want to perpetuate an activity so obviously NOT in accordance with the happening it’s supposed to represent? Greed and materialism are in diametric opposition to the tenets of Christianity, common sense and morality in general. When I was a child, we were lucky to get 5 or 6 gifts, none of them dreadfully expensive (I mean really lucky-there were times when we didn’t get anything more than clothes). I remember when I was 11, overhearing my father complaining that Christmas had cost him almost $200 that year. Almost $200! That included four bikes, a ton of clothes (most of them from K-Mart or Sears, it’s true-God! I hated those Sears Toughskins jeans!), and toys and games for five children. People nowadays have been known to spend 5-or-6 hundred dollars or more on EACH CHILD. Now, it’s true, inflation has something to do with it, but not all. A “Walmart Special” bike (a “K-Mart Special” back then) that cost $30 or $40 when I was a child costs $100 today. Still, inflation can’t account for everything. It’s just gotten ridiculous. We’ve become a culture that has more money than common sense, and a seriously skewed sense of what’s appropriate.
We never just got money-that simply wasn’t done back then. You didn’t give children money. It was assumed that money was for adults, with adult uses. A kid might or might not get an “allowance”-an outmoded concept nowadays-but he or she NEVER got money. Do you really want your children-sub-adults with an undefined sense of appropriateness and an at-best-foggy sense of boundaries-running around unsupervised with a load of cash in their pockets, in a world where elementary-school students regularly experiment with drugs? Where knives and guns (stolen by other kids with boundary issues) are sold in schools for a tenth the value someone’s father paid for them?
What do you teach a child when you give him a bunch of fancy junk for no reason? You teach him to be greedy; to expect something for nothing; and to expect more of it next year. A child doesn’t really understand limits and boundaries; that’s what the adults are supposed to teach them.
Children are spoiled, self-indulgent, and forced into making adult decisions far sooner than they have the capabilities for. They know no boundaries nowadays; the courts tell the parents that they can’t punish the children; they throw the parents in jail for disciplining the child, then make the parents responsible for the offenses the wild, undisciplined (by court decree) minor child commits. This leaves the parents in a horrible situation: forced to “give up” in self-defense on an unruly child by throwing him or her on the tender mercies of the juvenile offender system, which leads all too often to worse treatment than the child ever received from the parents, except in the worst cases of genuine abuse.
“Commercialmas” is just a symptom, evidence of a deeper rot in this country. If we don’t start exercising some control on the natural, built-in human greed that is a part of us all, I fear we’ll have some hard questions to answer one day. Better to start addressing them now, while we still have a hope, however vague, of doing something about them.
Christmas has gotten too commercial, and as a result has lost its spiritual aspect for most people. It’s become so blatant, with articles in the newspapers talking of how retailers are hoping to make up for poor sales during the earlier part of the year by making massive profits during the “Christmas selling season” that we’ve become numbed to the crass, cheap obviousness of it all. People are irritable at Christmas because they're spending money they don't have on things the people they're buying for don't need. Everyone forgets that this is supposed to be a celebration of the birth of Christ (even though it's not His actual birthday, but an early Christian appropriation of the pagan Yuletide celebration). Given the rampant materialism that sweeps this country every year at this time, it's no wonder the spiritualism has gone out of it.
Christmas gifts, if they have to be bought, should be limited to children. But do we really want to perpetuate an activity so obviously NOT in accordance with the happening it’s supposed to represent? Greed and materialism are in diametric opposition to the tenets of Christianity, common sense and morality in general. When I was a child, we were lucky to get 5 or 6 gifts, none of them dreadfully expensive (I mean really lucky-there were times when we didn’t get anything more than clothes). I remember when I was 11, overhearing my father complaining that Christmas had cost him almost $200 that year. Almost $200! That included four bikes, a ton of clothes (most of them from K-Mart or Sears, it’s true-God! I hated those Sears Toughskins jeans!), and toys and games for five children. People nowadays have been known to spend 5-or-6 hundred dollars or more on EACH CHILD. Now, it’s true, inflation has something to do with it, but not all. A “Walmart Special” bike (a “K-Mart Special” back then) that cost $30 or $40 when I was a child costs $100 today. Still, inflation can’t account for everything. It’s just gotten ridiculous. We’ve become a culture that has more money than common sense, and a seriously skewed sense of what’s appropriate.
We never just got money-that simply wasn’t done back then. You didn’t give children money. It was assumed that money was for adults, with adult uses. A kid might or might not get an “allowance”-an outmoded concept nowadays-but he or she NEVER got money. Do you really want your children-sub-adults with an undefined sense of appropriateness and an at-best-foggy sense of boundaries-running around unsupervised with a load of cash in their pockets, in a world where elementary-school students regularly experiment with drugs? Where knives and guns (stolen by other kids with boundary issues) are sold in schools for a tenth the value someone’s father paid for them?
What do you teach a child when you give him a bunch of fancy junk for no reason? You teach him to be greedy; to expect something for nothing; and to expect more of it next year. A child doesn’t really understand limits and boundaries; that’s what the adults are supposed to teach them.
Children are spoiled, self-indulgent, and forced into making adult decisions far sooner than they have the capabilities for. They know no boundaries nowadays; the courts tell the parents that they can’t punish the children; they throw the parents in jail for disciplining the child, then make the parents responsible for the offenses the wild, undisciplined (by court decree) minor child commits. This leaves the parents in a horrible situation: forced to “give up” in self-defense on an unruly child by throwing him or her on the tender mercies of the juvenile offender system, which leads all too often to worse treatment than the child ever received from the parents, except in the worst cases of genuine abuse.
“Commercialmas” is just a symptom, evidence of a deeper rot in this country. If we don’t start exercising some control on the natural, built-in human greed that is a part of us all, I fear we’ll have some hard questions to answer one day. Better to start addressing them now, while we still have a hope, however vague, of doing something about them.