(You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at Jkfitz42@cs.com. This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
Now, don’t get me wrong: many of these nagging folks are right on target. They are part of the “Keep Christ in Christmas” campaign that has been around for as long as I can remember, and which I applaud. One of my grammar school nuns back in the 1950s went so far as to insist that we use the phrase “Happy Christmas” rather than “Merry Christmas,” because the word “merry” was associated with drink and holiday revelry more than the sacred nature of Christmas Day. I didn’t get the point back then, but I was in the 5th grade and did not grasp the difference in connotation between “merry” and “happy.” I am still not sure I see the difference now. I got Sister’s point though a few years later, when I was in high school and discovered that Midnight Mass was often frequented by beery college boys home for the holidays, taking an hour break in their boozing at the local taverns. (Although, it must be said: At least they felt an obligation to get to Mass in those pre-Vatican II days.)
I have met good people who insist on giving their children only one or two small hand-made toys at Christmas, items sold to relieve poverty in Appalachia or support inner city orphanages. They don’t want their children to get caught up in the commercialism associated with Christmas. I see their point also, even though my Christmas buying habits were of a different character. Different? I’ll say. I half-expected the manager of the local Toys ‘R Us to roll out the red carpet when my wife and I entered the premises. I confess: our kids got more bikes and video games than Appalachian straw dolls and hand-carved spinning tops. And it got worse at my mother’s house. I am the oldest of six, so my children were the first grandchildren in our family. My brothers and sisters would load up our children with so many presents that I often was not sure that I would be able to fit them into the car for the trip home.
So I get it. I appreciate the warnings about the loss of the spiritual meaning of Christmas. What I object to is something else: what I see as crankiness about Christmas revelry rooted more in left-wing ideology than a reverence for the birth of Christ. I submit that there is a good deal of that imbedded in the protests against the materialism of modern Christmas; that there are those who promote an austere Christmas more to bash middle-class values and the American free-market system than to keep Christ in Christmas.
What kind of people do I have in mind? Well, I get suspicious when the person deploring the “loss of the true meaning of Christmas” has spent his life seeking to undermine the otherworldly aspects of Christianity and writing letters-to-the-editor chastising Catholics who do not support a leftist social agenda and the programs of the United Nations; or someone who has never been reluctant to ally himself with the secular world view of Latin American Marxist groups or North American socialist ideologues such as Saul Alinsky and Michael Harrington. You have to wonder how someone could find a Christmas reveler drinking an extra glass of champagne more materialistic than a Sandinista party boss working to transform Jesus into the prototype of Che Guevara.
Admittedly, many modern Christmas images spring from a capitalist and bourgeois source. I have been told that our figure of a rather burly Santa Claus in fir-trimmed red garments can be traced back no further than Coca-Cola ads in the years before World War II; that Clement Moore’s St. Nick in “The Night Before Christmas” was actually a jolly elf, a little fellow, not at all like the department store Santas of today. As were the St. Nicholas and Father Christmas images of the 19th century – elderly men in long white robes.
But so what? Christmas as it has evolved in the United States has much that is good and decent about it. I could sense that when I used to teach high school in a suburb of New York City. More than once I heard Jewish students – usually sweet-tempered girls – say something like, “I know I am not supposed to, but I love Christmas.”
These students were not reacting to selfish dreams of an abundance of presents sitting under a Christmas tree. It was not the materialism of Christmas that they found inspiring. Rather, they recognized, in the seasonal snow scenes and warm Christmas lights and images of family gatherings, something good and decent and expressive of an ideal of how life should be lived all year round. They saw the joy of children opening their Christmas gifts as an expression of the goodness of the world, of our capacity to do kind things for each other to make our lives better.
We all know the cliché: “If only we could keep the Christmas spirit alive all year round.” Precisely. The bourgeois Christmas of home and hearth and family and gift giving is an expression of Christian love, a glimpse of how the world is meant to be when it will be remade in Christ. Even though some overdo it, there is nothing wrong with dedicating a day to enjoying fine food and drink, with giving gifts and doing all within our power to give small children a sense of wonder. The old Christmas carols had it right. Joy to the world. Let nothing you dismay; Christ our Savior was born this Christmas day. There is nothing wrong with gathering our family around us and celebrating that fact. Go ahead: have a glass of wine, take out another present from behind the couch for your favorite niece. God made the world and it is good. It’s the best time of the year – for good reason.
