As the Christmas Season finally concluded last week with the Feast of the Epiphany, my mind remained cluttered with varied and contrary thoughts about the way our culture is treating Christmas. Even after more than two weeks’ reflection, my view is not completely clear. Still, I would like to share my thinking so readers can do some thinking of their own. Bear with me as I move from point to point; it may or may not add up to a coherent argument.
First, there is little surprise that what Catholics call “Advent” is virtually invisible in American culture. Even within the Church, Advent meant little more than “Little Lent” to most Catholics until the last 40 years, and by then the rising power of consumerism had already absorbed the entire calendar between “Black Friday” and Christmas Eve. Indeed, our economy has become so dependent on that period’s retail sales (for some retail items, that single month yields the majority of annual revenue) that it would appear downright un-American to insist that people spend much of December in quiet reflection and preparation rather than frantic shopping and celebration.
Second, the traditional “12 days of Christmas” have largely disappeared as well. I wonder what people think now when they hear the song? In any case, after a month of nonstop shopping, parties, concerts and outings leading up to Christmas day, most people are too out of gas to rev up for an additional 12 days of celebrating. Besides, not much is happening once Christmas Day passes--except gift returns, post-Christmas sales, and end-of-year preparations for New Year’s celebrations.
Third, you probably noticed that in 2011, more than previous years, the very word “Christmas” has become endangered. Advertisers and media referred to “the holidays,” the “holiday season,” sometimes even simply “holiday.” Governors renamed their state Christmas trees the “Holiday Tree”; people wished each other “Happy Holidays,” and commercials even parodied Christian attempts to refocus on Christmas, telling us that it is the “season of the reason” for buying a new car.
It almost seems that Christmas is becoming the holiday that dare not speak its name (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde)!
My initial reflex is to adopt my traditional Christmas role as cultural curmudgeon. Growing up, my kids got used to their dad’s way of digging in his heels: traipsing through the woods on Thanksgiving weekend to find a suitable Jesse Tree, painting it and adding one decoration each day during Advent, lighting an Advent wreath each night at dinner, buying our Christmas tree only days before Christmas, then decorating it and installing our Christmas lights on Christmas Eve, scheduling family gatherings during Christmas week. To this day, they tend to turn a jaundiced eye when Christmas displays appear immediately after Thanksgiving, when “holiday music” fills the malls in November, or when Christmas trees appear tossed into the trash on the 3rd Day of Christmas.
But despite my usual hardline instincts for preserving a “traditional” approach to Christmas, I also feel a growing discomfort when I notice that my reactions are matched by many people whose assumptions I do not share.
Some of these people argue that we must preserve Christmas because we are a “Christian nation.” I respectfully disagree. Our nation has Christian roots, but is officially non-sectarian.
Others see themselves defending “traditional” Christmas, when in fact many Christmas customs they defend are less than 100 years old. Even the celebration of Christmas itself is not a constant tradition in our national history. In Puritan New England, for example, its observance was largely outlawed, and in the new American republic even Congress was in session on Christmas Day. We invoke “traditional” for many Christmas customs that have little real tradition behind them (the Christmas crèche is one exception, dating from Francis of Assisi).
Of course, some people simply argue we must preserve “the reason for the season.” But they’re often unclear about what that reason is. Jesus’ birthday is undoubtedly a significant event--but what does celebrating it signify? Some equate it with the “Incarnation” (God taking on human flesh), but Catholicism observes the Incarnation on March 25, and Catholics surely do not wish to argue that the unborn Jesus was not already God in human form. Others see the event as manifesting God’s gift to the world, but we already have Epiphany for that.
My own view is that we celebrate Jesus’ birthday as the moment when his place in history is announced--specifically, his role as the Prince of Peace, offering peace and goodwill to the human family. This matters because it creates an unbreakable bond between Christian faith and the cause of peace.
Finally, some people want to insist on trumpeting “Christmas” to resist what they see as a dangerous inclusivity that embraces Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and, even “Festivus,” and fears offending Jews, Muslims, and even atheists. Personally, I prefer to embrace that inclusivity, and to avoid offense, although I never assume that Christmas greetings will offend (in one store I asked a veiled employee, who was in fact Muslim, how she felt, and we ended up both offering “Happy Christmas” greetings!).
I hesitate to embrace any of these reasons for opposing current trends. Instead, I’m beginning to see this cultural divide--avoiding all but the most generic references to the “holidays,” vs. the loud proclamation of “Christmas”--as a symptom of another, deeper trend in America.
More and more, I sense America drifting (perhaps without much sense of direction) toward a new cultural destination, and, I would argue, toward its true destiny. For I now believe we’re becoming, finally, the land of the religious option.
By that I mean, we’re becoming a land where anyone has the option to choose any religion they want, or no religion at all. This may sound obvious (we think immediately of the First Amendment), but stop and think how rare it actually is.
For most of history, large nations typically mandated (or favored) one official religion and prohibited (or disapproved) all others. So people often had no option, or at least suffered penalties for exercising an option. In the last century, we also saw new nations (like the Soviet Union) that mandated no religion at all. And in much of Europe today, the religious option is tolerated but not well protected.
Even in America, the principle of religious freedom has clashed with the practice of favoring Christianity over all other religions. Americans today remain the most religiously active population of any advanced nation, but now the dominance of Christianity is being challenged by others.
The result is the kind of inconsistency that we might naturally expect when a society is going through a major cultural transition. For example, we hear “Christmas” less and less in the public realm, and we see less and less “Christmas” observance in our towns and cities, street, parks and public places--yet “Christmas Day” remains a legal holiday!
Similarly we continue to see trees, and lights, Santa Claus, and the exchange of gifts (indeed, all these have become key to our economies holiday sales) yet they have all been largely uprooted from their Christian origins.
Something like this has already happened with Valentine’s Day, and Saint Patrick’s Day, Halloween, and even Easter--although we are not yet avoiding those names, only their public religious observance.
Underlying such inconsistency is a conviction that Christianity should enjoy no special privileges. Thus, saying “The Holidays” comes to represent people of all faiths and no faith. The trouble is: why is December 25 a holiday at all, if not to observe the birth of Jesus? Should we print calendars that just say “Holiday Day” in that day’s box?
America may be destined to become the one nation where religion truly is an option--where one may choose any religion without facing mandates, or prohibitions, or privileges, or penalties; a land where the religious option is alive and widely exercised and fair to all traditions. When this happens, America’s religious profile will be nearly unique in all the world.
But meanwhile we are living with the inconsistencies of a transition in which the dominance of Christianity is challenged but not completely erased. In short, we are clearly living in a time of cultural flux, when our principles and our practices do not always match.
In other words, we Americans (and even we American Christians) are still making history. It is not always easy, and it is sometimes troubling and messy, but maybe it simply proves that God is not finished with us yet.
Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012
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