An Interesting Idea

A friend put a copy of a newspaper article in my mailbox at the church this last Sunday. It is an opinion piece and I'm sorry to say I don't know what paper it is from. The author is Mary Jane Wilkie from Morristown, NJ, and the title of the essay is "To truly honor Christmas, end its status as an official holiday." It is an interesting suggestion Ms. Wilkie makes - that if the official holiday status of Christmas was removed by Congress, as it bestowed that status in 1870, that we as Christians and consequently the church could recover the deeper meanings of this holy day.

I suspect Ms. Wilkie is struggling with the consumerist mentality that pervades this holiday season and she wants to recover some sense of a "truer", or more faithful, celebration of Christmas. As her argument goes, we as followers of Christ would have to consciously choose to celebrate the holiday by taking personal days or vacation time and therefore would be more committed to the faithful celebration of Christ's birth. There is something appealing about this suggestion.

What is appealing about it is not that her suggestion would work but rather that she has accurately described the problem with the culture's celebration (i.e. consumerism) of Christmas and taken a stab at a solution. While I like the idea, I personally don't think it would work because the issues that she describes are ultimately symptomatic and don't go to the source of the issue. While it would be good if we were less consumeristic, we cannot be unless we address the issues that are behind that turn to consumerism. To address those issues, then we have to turn to face the ultimate meaning questions of living - "Why am I here?" "What am I supposed to do with my life?" "Where is it all going?" "What are my relationships with other human begins to be?" These are only a few examples of the kinds of questions that I think we would have to wrestle with in order to address the deeper issue. It seems to me that we turn to consumerism in an effort to bring meaning to life when we don't have the opportunity, we don't choose to take the opportunity, and/or we don't have the skills to ask or answer those ultimate meaning questions. For the church to reclaim Christmas, or for that matter any holy day and its relevance and message of good news, then we have to reclaim teaching folks how to wrestle with those questions and help them find some answers. It won't always be easy or necessarily lead to easily found answers. But like Jacob at the Jabbok, if we don't give up the wrestling, then we'll discover a blessing in the struggle even if we walk a little gingerly afterwards.