Across the Pastor’s Desk by Kyle Fever

“Christmastime is here; happiness and cheer.”

So goes the first line of the song many of us know from the Charlie Brown Christmas program. Our culture advertises this sentiment pretty heavily, and sells it effectively. I am annually captivated by the sights, sounds, smells and general atmosphere of Christmas.

I am also captivated by the fact that the form and even ethos of “Christmas” as we know it today are relatively recent creations of the modern upper class mind.

It was not until the 1920s that the commercial Christmas really took root in the United States, with window displays and advertisements for a happy Christmas based on gift-giving. We can trace the modern concept of Santa Claus a bit before then — the Santa as we know of him with the round belly, sleigh and reindeer.

It was a development in the early 1820s, the result of two poems (“A New Year’s Present,” and “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” now commonly titled “The Night before Christmas”) written by relatively upper-class people, no doubt describing the sort of “Christmas” experience their life afforded them.

“Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.” Yes, this might reflect reality, unless you’re sleeping outside somewhere or have no real friends or family with whom to share the “joyous” night. Or if you’re working your hands to the bone, on your feet for 16 hours in service to commercialism.

It’s striking that the story of Jesus’ birth is the story of a child born into poverty, of a child immediately considered as a challenge to the dominant operating system of the Roman Empire and its ways.

Jesus’ very existence threatened to upend the top-down, power-driven Roman system by proclaiming a new king. Mary announced the significance of Jesus’ birth before he was born. Jesus’ birth signifies that God “has brought down those with power from their thrones and exalted those of low-class; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:52-53).

Jesus announced his mission similarly in Luke 4:18: “to proclaim good news to the poor … to send the broken down on their way free of burden.”

Any close reading of Jesus’ mission as it is announced challenges us to ask if our “Christmas” is a fitting celebration of this. Is our “Christmas” genuinely good news for the poor and downtrodden?

Consider the myth of Santa Claus. It’s striking that the fourth century Christian St. Nicholas, after whom the now far removed “Santa Claus” gets his name and identity, originally gave gifts to the poor. Not only that, but the gifts he traditionally gave were of the type that transformed the social location of the recipients. Out of poverty into new life, not just some toys and other things to feel better for a day.

When I taught about first century history, I often reminded students of the truism that the history recorded and kept is often the story of the winners. Well, what about the Christmas we know today? What if the traditions and script of “Christmas” we now celebrate were written by people on the other side of the now popularized Christmas script? What happened to their voices? Have they just been drowned out by “all the noise, noise, noise, noise!” as Dr. Seuss famously wrote?

Now, this is not the part of the article where I’m going to tell you, “Jesus is the reason for the season.” Such a statement, I think, misses the point. To say, “Jesus is the reason for the season,” without any second thought for how we as a culture have constructed the season in the first place, risks making Jesus the reason for something that is profoundly un-Jesus-y.

Rather, I invite you to look around. If we look around and pause for a minute, if we just stop and listen, we all know that there’s something deeply not quite right. And, yes, that thought threatens our comfortable happiness. Frankly, that’s what Jesus did well. He still does.

“Christmastime is here” does not amount to “happiness and cheer” for a lot of people. The more recent take on Christmas, the movie “The Polar Express,” capitalizes (ironically in more ways than one) on this side of Christmas.

For Billy, the Christmas the other kids know about has never “come to town.” When Jesus came to town, the effect was the opposite.

Interestingly, it doesn’t take long to see that our cultural “Christmas” even capitalizes on religious language. In the movie “The Polar Express,” Billy and other such kids are only told to “believe.” If they only believe, then Christmas will come.

The trouble is, we all know that just believing in the spirit of Christmas doesn’t compute. There are countless children and families whose “just believe” tank is pretty empty because years of believing in “Christmas” has resulted in nothing, or in something very different from what is sold as “Christmas”— particularly the “Christmas” our culture has collectively constructed that still comes with precise regularity for other children and families.

I’m not saying we should diminish Christmas, or to stop believing in the spirit of Christmas. To the contrary, I think we already have and as the band Styx says, we’re just “fooling ourselves.” What I am saying is that we need to greatly expand the “happiness and cheer” and redirect “Christmas” in a way that it is genuinely good news for the poor and downtrodden. If it is not good news for them, from a Biblical standpoint we’re celebrating something other than Jesus’ incarnation. And that’s fine. Let’s just be clear on that and not think we’re celebrating something we’re not, or worse yet, confuse Jesus’ incarnation with modern “Christmas” celebration.

“Christmastime is here; happiness and cheer.” Yes, it’s here, but for whom? As the modern pop song goes, “Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?”

 

Kyle Fever is associate minister at First Lutheran in Albert Lea.