|
On Christmas Day, devout Christians of hundreds of denominations will gather in their churches only to discover that they cannot find a seat. Dutiful weekly churchgoers will find their pews filled with people they have never seen before. And some may fume quietly that this is merely the last in a long list of Yuletide indignities, what with garish lights, tinsel and Muzaked Christmas carols infesting the very ether from November 1 on. If the annual blizzard of cards, flyers and catalogues were not enough to induce a nervous breakdown, there is always that new collection of nativity-scene statuettes that includes among the ceramic miniature worshippers the late Princess of Wales and the murdered fashion designer Gianni Versace.
Faithful but distracted Christians will commonly blame their discomfort upon the "commercialization of Christmas." "This is all cultural imperialism," rages Ernest Skublics, dean of Mount Angel Seminary near Portland, Oregon. "People who have no business owning Christmas end up ruining it for people who do. If it were possible to copyright the day, I'd do it and only let the churches use it. This vulgarization of Christmas is a totally unacceptable intrusion by the non-Christian majority."
Perhaps the stranger phenomenon, however, is the survival of Christian symbols within the now-secular holiday. A century ago this Christmas, in 1897, the New York Sun's sardonic Frank Church wrote, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist." Never mentioning the historical birth of Jesus Christ, this manifesto celebrated instead "poetry, love and romance," thus marking the dawn of Christmas as a primarily man-made festival.
The secularization of Christmas may have been gradual, but it has been steady. "I always found Christmas extremely artificial," says veteran journalist Peter Worthington, a child of the 1920s. "There was always this awful tension from this oppressive need to be jolly." His most vivid recollection is of a furious political argument that swept the family dinner table and ended only when his father hacked into the Christmas turkey and grumbled, "Dammit, it's Christmas; we're supposed to be merry."
A hundred years after "Yes, Virginia," when barely 20% of Canadians attend weekly religious devotions, such sanitized sentiments seem appropriate. Yet, according to the Gallup organization, fully 94% of Canadians set aside Christmas as an important holiday, and a whopping 63% attend a Christmas church service, tripling normal attendance. A random sample of unchurched or "occasionally attending" western Canadians confirms not only that Christmas is the most important holiday but that the Christ-child remains the holiday's most important symbol. From this perspective, the "commercialization of Christmas" is less a corruption of religion than Christianity's enduring foothold in a pagan world.
"The Baby Jesus is most important, most important," says Patricia Peura of Coquitlam, a Christmas enthusiast with no church affiliation. "He's our reason for kindness. If you just like to give to people, and what you're thinking about is giving, you don't have to worry about Christmas being commercialized." Every year, in the first week of December, Mrs. Peura organizes a party of her childhood friends, and on the last Sunday before Christmas, she throws one for dozens of neighbourhood children.
Calgarian Cathy Michie, an occasional churchgoer and fervent fan of Christmas, agrees. "Christmas is a time for taking stock, for new beginnings, like the Baby Jesus," she says. "Every year, people complain about Christmas being too commercial, but if they're forced into being generous one day out of the year, maybe that's not such a bad thing."
The real mystery, however, may be why the holiday—once a "holy day"—survives at all in a bluntly secular culture. And in a secular culture, the first and most obvious explanation is commercial. "Christmas is basically a revitalization myth," says agnostic Michael Shermer, sociologist and publisher of Skeptic magazine (story on page 36 of printed edition). "And the first thing it revitalizes is the economy. If the economy didn't get that added shot of adrenaline once a year, lots of small businessmen would go under." Hallowe'en merchandising sales have now equalled or surpassed Easter sales in various markets, he adds, confirming that business needs these quarterly clearances—Easter, the summer clearance, Hallowe'en and Christmas.
However, though merchandising obviously takes advantage of the occasion, it may be responding to the festival rather than creating it. Calgary lawyer-entrepreneur Jeffrey Poole finds it "lamentable" that the commercial cycle is deformed by holiday extravagance. "A whole segment of the economy booms for 45 days"—kiosks, push-carts, catalogue sales—"and then it all dies over the next two months," he argues. "Dedicated retailers have to pay rent for the full 365 days of the year, but they can never reap the full advantage of that 45 days of holiday traffic." Seasonal extravagance causes some increase in trade, but the slump always follows, so holiday splurges are inefficient uses of manufacturing capacity, warehousing, retail space and trained employees, he argues. Merchants may compete noisily in response to the holiday traffic, but it is inaccurate, he thinks, to say that merchandising causes the feast.
If the necessities of the marketplace are not responsible for the endurance of Christmas, what is? For a persistent majority of Canadians, Christmas is typically the most important day of their year. Yet they do not think of it as the birth of the Saviour, the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, sent to suffer and die for the redemption of our sins. Yet, despite being faithless, the student choirs in hundreds of public schools insist upon singing, "Oh Come, All Ye Faithful." So when it comes to all the explicitly religious symbols—the Babe, the Holy Family, the angels, shepherds and wise men—why does the secular culture keep Christmas at all?
Sceptic Michael Shermer suggests there is a natural human impulse for festivals marking of the passage of seasons. "Human societies have always had a mid-winter festival," he says. "Our own Christmas came out of the Saturnalia, when the Romans gave each other gifts." The pagan Vikings celebrated "Midvinterblot," sacrificing both animals and human beings to convince the winter gnome, Jul (Yule), to loosen his grip on the land. Tibetans celebrated Dosmoche, dancing in masks to frighten away the evil spirits, and Pakistanis observed Chaomos, when they purify themselves with water and goat's blood. The Egyptians, Chinese and Celts all celebrated winter solstice festivals. "Man is a pattern-seeking animal, and it's not hard to see how marking the seasons gives some evolutionary advantages, patterns that can help in survival, when it comes to things like the migration of animal herds and planting and harvesting. Calendar-making's part of human nature."
Psychologist William Coulson, director of the Research Council on Ethnopsychology in California, agrees with Mr. Shermer that human beings are naturally calendar-makers. But he contends that this basic impulse to "number our days" (as the Bible's Book of Proverbs says) points to something far more profound than simply the survival instinct. "Unlike animals, we need to see our lives against the backdrop of eternity," he says. "We need to see our purposes as having some bearing on eternity." The majority of people do not go to church only on Christmas, he continues. They also go to christen their young, to marry their children, and to bury their dead. In these ways people try to see their lives in the context of eternity. And if the secular Christmas, in all its extravagance, helps them to see that on a yearly basis, so much the better, he concludes. "We should all be grateful for the trees and Santas."
Calgary mother of two Carolyn Poole agrees that Christmas brings an understanding not usually available in the daily bustle of life. A self-professed "Christmas junkie," she makes a point of attending a church service December 25, as part of her family tradition. "Every year at Christmas, I'm struck by the fact that the whole world has shut down," says Mrs. Poole. "People all over the world, in Britain, Brazil, South Africa—everybody is just relaxing with their families, going to church, but mainly just stopping. When I think of everywhere, all of us just stopping, all at the same time, it gives me a real sense of connectedness to the world." Her husband, Jeffrey Poole, then adds, "it's an old saying, but it's true, that we all need to learn to live as 'human beings,' rather than 'human doings.'"
Human festivals marking our days may all be a kind of "stopping." However, the way that Christmas is marked may also be something more. Occasional churchgoers Michael and Jocelyn Langdon of Calgary, parents of five, insist that Christmas is defined by generosity, even extravagant generosity. "When people complain that Christmas has become too commercial, they don't mean that everybody else is too greedy," says Mr. Langdon. "They mean that it's hard to be really generous when we're so prosperous. We can buy things without blinking that our parents couldn't dream of, and that can make any present seem kind of impersonal." To buck the impersonality of modern gift-giving, the Langdons make a large number of their gifts themselves. One year, Mrs. Langdon made over a dozen polar-fleece jester hats; this year, she and her sister are giving home-made bathsalts and handcreams.
Gift-giving is often found in non-Christian cultures. The Indians of the Pacific Northwest, for example, have been famous for their potlatches, gift-giving ceremonies of legendary excess. And Japanese corporate culture has reportedly adopted the custom of immoderate presents. But ethnographer Martha Black of the Royal British Columbia Museum warns against any comparison between the potlatch and Christmas—a warning which might also apply to Japanese (and even western) corporate gifts. "The potlatch was more a part of their legal system or form of government," she says. "It attached to all sorts of ceremonies, like taking a new name, marriage, taking political office. The recipient of a present actually became a witness to the rights and privileges being put forward."
Certainly Christmas gift-giving can become primarily a matter of status and influence. It may be so even now, in North American corporate board rooms and legislative offices. But according to Gallup, 96% of Canadians celebrate Christmas with "friends and family." The most constant refrain among secular celebrants is that "Christmas is for the children," "Christmas is for cousins," and "Christmas is for the family." So the ever-popular images of the Baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph may be the way in which the generosity of the secularized Yuletide is preserved from degenerating into politics.
"We tend to downplay the Christmas presents, because it's really a celebration of the family," says Port McNeill, Mayor Gerry Furney, an avid celebrant who avoids "organized religion" in any form. "If somebody's been doing some baking, that's great. If they've been knitting, that's better yet. But what they're giving is the gift of their time." Mr. Furney believes in "togetherness," rather than generosity, as the defining characteristic of the feast; but he also insists that togetherness is the highest form of generosity. "The real gift at Christmas is being with others. People need other people more than things. It's spending time together that really makes strong families, and everything else comes from that."
Mrs. Poole believes that Christmas extravagance actually finds its place in the family gathering. "Sure, the kids can go crazy," she muses. "But what the adults really like to do is watch all of their other family members opening their gifts. It's when we watch everybody else opening their gifts that we begin to realize how fortunate we really are. The gifts and the togetherness all blend together, and it makes for a really peaceful thankfulness, a sort of grateful serenity."
Philosopher Donald DeMarco of St. Jerome's College at Waterloo University agrees entirely. "The essence of a feast is gratitude, the need to thank someone, the urge to express an unbounded appreciation for everything," he says. "So you can't have a feast without an element of excess. The true feast, the religious feast, points to something transcendent, something that we can never adequately thank; so the refusal to be stingy or cautious is essential to the attempt."
Feasting has always faced two challenges, argues Prof. DeMarco: the problem of being only "moderately excessive," so gratitude does not degenerate into self-indulgence, and the problem of knowing whom to thank. Many a Mardi Gras reveller, Thanksgiving glutton, and Christmas prodigal have regretted their "excessive excess." But some measure of extravagance remains essential to the feast, he insists. "If only for one day of the year, the reluctance to calculate what we can afford, the unwillingness to be generous only from our surplus, that's the way we acknowledge that we ourselves are not the source of our bounty. We acknowledge our dependence by spending our substance—hurling ourselves back into the arms of dependency."
The problem of knowing whom to thank seems especially acute in modern times, since the secular Christmas tries to enjoy the gratitude without acknowledging the source of everything for which people want to express gratitude. But the benign and innocent Child Jesus, "the author of all existence, giving Himself to us in all helplessness," always lies close to the surface of even the most commercial celebrations, waiting to recapture them.
"The religious impulse can't be suppressed," says Prof DeMarco. "Mankind tries to establish purely secular feasts, like Victoria Day or Labour Day, but they always fall flat. People want to be grateful for their whole lives, so any real feast aims far above the earthly." Only a religious feast can ultimately satisfy human need.
Psychologist Coulson agrees. "Most people feel that they're diminished by constantly calculating their self-interest day in and day out," he suggests. "They feel a real need to be generous, and they feel that need to the degree to which they love their life. Gratitude is certainly one of the first, most elemental impulses of human life, and generosity is the way we express our gratitude." The supposed problem of the "commercialization" of Christmas is not that people are driven unwillingly into excessive generosity, the psychologist insists. Generosity is part of any birthday party. The problem is simply forgetting whose birthday is being celebrated.
—Joe Woodard
BC Report is available at your favorite newsstand,
or save up to 43% with a subscription
|
