What is Christmas All About?

Sometimes I come across a story that makes me want to cry out and prove the pen is mightier than the sword. This is one of those times.

“By 4:55, [Black Friday] with no police officers in sight, the crowd of more than 2,000 [in front of a Walmart in New York] had become a rabble, and could be held back no longer. Fists banged and shoulders pressed on the sliding-glass double doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault. Six to 10 workers inside tried to push back, but it was hopeless. Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains. One worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him. Others who had stood alongside Mr. Damour trying to hold the doors were also hurled back and run over, witnesses said. “

Mr. Damour died at the scene. While the rescue workers were trying to save him, shoppers continued to flow in until they closed the store. Truly, there are no words for such horror. In the face of such evil and greed, words fail utterly. Looking at my local newspaper’s story on this, I particularly liked one online comment. It’s stated a stronger way than I would have said it, but I think the writer has some great points.

“Face reality folks. Christmas is no longer the celebration that it was intended to be. It is simply a season of greed, waste and hatred. When was it that children told parents what they “had to have” for Christmas? When was it that a gift became what someone wanted and not what the giver wanted them to have? Greed is the primary force behind Christmas. Second only to ego. People have ego that drives them to spend more than they can afford to “show-off” on Christmas by giving the biggest and most expensive gifts. Imagine all those who ran past this innocent man, trampling him boasting on Christmas as they hand over that black Friday gift. How many will say, “Look at this gift I got you. You are so important to me that I killed a man to get you a $30 MP3 player! Aren’t I wonderful?”

This year in particular has had me questioning what the season is about. (If my family is reading this, please understand what I am about to say is not meant personally toward you.) I have been watching people at the grocery store, seeing the Christmas displays go up right after Halloween and the gaudy holiday displays on people’s lawns. Snowmen and reindeer are everywhere. It seemed Thanksgiving was about eating not necessarily as a celebration of life and the gifts it holds much less a mention of who we are grateful to. I love the olives on the fingers and the turkey as much as anyone else but it rather frightens me that I didn’t think about the thankful part of Thanksgiving until the day before. (Thus you read one of my recent postings.)

So I am there celebrating Thanksgiving with my family. A Thanksgiving tradition for my brother in law is to go through each add for Black Friday and map out his buying plans for the next day. It’s not shopping, it’s buying. According to him, you do not shop on Black Friday. You get in, you get what you want, and you get on to the next store. He is very systematic about this and makes sure my sister is too. Now, I don’t actually have a problem with the idea of getting a good deal on an item you need or would really like to give someone. I myself have a talent for finding things on a good sale. (Consider the beautiful ball gown I once bought at J.C. Penney’s for $9.76.) But quite frankly, most of the stuff bought by people are bought by those still spending too much money on things that put their focus in the wrong places. In recent years, this trend of Black Friday has gotten crazier and crazier to the point people are literally camped out on the sidewalks having Thanksgiving dinner delivered to them. So now, not only is Christmas distorted but Thanksgiving, the idea of being grateful to God for our lives, is cast aside before the shiny glass doors of “Stuff-Mart”.

Stuff-Mart is a store in one of my absolute favorite Vegi-Tale videos. Madame Blueberry is jealous of her friends and is convinced she has to have all this new stuff so she goes shopping and fills cart after cart after cart. When it is delivered to her house in a tree, the stuff she bought makes it so heavy, the tree bends over, breaks, and falls into the nearby lake. It is only then she sees a poor girl who is thankful for a piece of apple pie on her birthday and finally understands that it is far better for us to be grateful for what we have than to desire what we do not.

I look around me at my life and I am grateful for what I have. There are some things I would like to have like the Grimerie book from Wicked or a docking station for my ipod but those are maybe somedays, things I will save up for and then purchase. I have everything I need and a great deal of what I want. I have enough. I have enough clothes though they aren’t the latest style, they are clean and I am comfortable in them. I have shoes including dancing shoes and I know I am very fortunate in that. I have a great camera I love using but that is something I dreamt of for years and worked on saving up enough to be able to purchase. My bed is well over thirty years old and that’s not virtue it was given to me by a friend when she moved and I love it. Most of my furniture in fact is secondhand or something I have had since I was a teenager. I like it, it works for me and I have enough decorating talent to make it look like my home to me. I am now old enough to realise unless little stuff has special meaning, like the sister figurines my sister gave to me last Christmas or the Betty Book cup and saucer given to me by a friend, I don’t want it. I don’t buy that stuff for myself anymore because I know exactly where it will go, nowhere and then I’ll have to dust it. I admit, my books are the exception to this idea, I love my library. But I would rather have a few quality things I will get a lot of use out of than a bunch of junk that will break anyway.

But come on, do you really need that huge ass tv that will now be the focus of your living room, bedrooms, and kitchen? Not having a lot of money, these have been pretty easy lessons to put into practice for me. I hope I would hold to the same if I made more. There is a part of me that would love to cruise around the world on a yacht, I long to see more of the world. But it wouldn’t make me happy. If I don’t choose to be happy now, I would not be happy then. Did the people shopping at that Walmart think what they wanted to buy would make them happy? I don’t think it’s that simple. Perhaps they too had been saving up for something they wanted. I think where they went astray is when they let the stuff be their focus, getting the deal, letting it fill their vision to the point they left the best things about being human behind- the ability to love and see God in ourselves and others. They ignored human life, a most precious and unique gift, for some crap off the shelf. How did that happen? How did we let our culture come to this? A culture so materialistic to the point we look at Christmas and see the presents under the tree, not the present in the hay. We look at the adds and see stars in our eyes and totally forget to look at the sky and see the stars in His. How did we come to this?

In recent years I believe I have heard mainly two reactions to Christmas. One are the people who revel in the holiday and celebrate it with joy and with God. The others, are the people who believe the only good thing about Christmas is getting it over with. And I have to tell you, I have heard from the second group far more than the first. The second group see the stress, the required gift buying, the trouble it all causes. The first group sees who it’s for. Christmas is not something to be gotten over. My heart aches for the people who tell their friends, “Let’s get together after the holidays. I need to get through them first.” THAT’S THE POINT!!!!!!!! YOU’RE ENTIRELY MISSING THE POINT OF CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!!!!!! Christmas is NOT something to get through while you ignore the ones you love and if you are stressed about Christmas, that is your own damn fault and it is up to YOU to do something about it. You cannot blame it on anyone else but yourself. You make your own choices. Christmas is not about the crap. Christmas is not about the stuff. Christmas is about God with us. Say it with me, GOD WITH US. Do you know how incredible that is? THAT is why we put up the lights, that is why we decorate the tree, and the gift he gave us is why we give gifts to each other – to remind us of the greatest gift.

I know finances are tight for many people right now and we all can’t spend as much as we often do, but that isn’t the point of Christmas anyway. To me, the gift that comes from the heart is worth far more than anything you just pull off the shelf at the store. One of my most memorable Christmas presents is a doll house. I’d wanted one for so long and though I often played with it and thoroughly enjoyed the gift, that is not why it is one of my favorites. That doll house is one of my favorite Christmas presents because of the time and effort it took my family to make it for me. After my sisters and I were in bed, they would drive over to my grandparents house and they would work on making my doll house, several burnt fingers from the hot glue were involved I understand. They love they put into it means for me to me than the house itself. You can do that with many other things. Last year, not for Christmas, I gave a quilt to my friend. The quilt was only a part of the gift, the love it involved took up a lot more room in that gift box than the quilt did. Love is what Christmas is about. Put that first, get creative, and that will mean far more, at least to me it would, than anything you could just go out and buy just to have a gift to give.

Now quite truthfully, this as much a lesson for me as for anyone who reads this. I still have the hope of a child of finding something under my tree Christmas morning, who has fond memories of opening stockings and presents with my sisters and celebrating Christmas Day together. Now that is in the past and I’m trying to learn what Christmas really is about because I don’t have the the surprises under my tree or the family on Christmas Day anymore so I am forced to ask these questions for myself. When you take away the presents and the family around you, what is left of Christmas? Is it still as precious as it always was? I don’t reproach my family on their choice to get together a few days after Christmas or that we are drastically cutting down the gift giving. I actually am in full agreement with their decision to let my siblings, (I’m the youngest of four in this family) have time with their other families, other parents or in-laws. I have two nieces who are two and a half. One is my sister’s daughter, the other is my brother’s daughter – they are twenty-three days apart. I want them to have what I had, a Christmas morning at home to open their presents, lay around in their pajamas and play with their new toys. You can’t do that if you have to be somewhere else in the morning and then throughout the day. It just brings me to a point to learn something I’d rather learn now than later. When Stuff-Mart is closed, when you bypass the materialism of the season, when the holiday is not what it once was in your memory, was does it look like for me and for you? What is Christmas really about and knowing that, how does it change how we act towards God and each other? Perhaps if we would ask that of ourselves as a culture, because we have all played a part in this, Mr. Damour might still be alive and celebrating with us today. Isn’t human life reason enough to ask the question?