For many years now I’ve quizzed my (largely but not exclusively white, evangelical Protestant) college students on what used to be called “cultural literacy” — being able to recognize names, titles and events and such, and having some minimal awareness of their meaning. We don’t talk about it much anymore because the very idea of rehabilitating it seems beyond quaint these days.
Usually I offer extra points, for example, if students know what a holiday is about. I begin with Labor Day, which our school acknowledges. I’ve never once had a student who knew what that was in all my decades of teaching. Veterans’ Day is nearly the same. Memorial Day is a complete mystery. The same with the liturgical calendar, of course, these being (again, largely) very low-church Protestants. I’m not sure any have ever been able to tell me what Advent is (most haven’t heard of it). You can guess the answer to whether they know Epiphany. Maundy Thursday? Don’t make me laugh. (Though when I started teaching, some students attended churches with foot-washing services then; those seem to have gone by the wayside.) And so on.
On the other hand, when I ask if they’ve ever sung “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in a worship service, all the hands go up.
For many years I’ve entertained a fantasy of a world where the church one day decides to fast from all the effluvia associated with Christmas, scale it way back, and for a decade chooses to just have a low-key service dedicated to reflecting on God’s Incarnation as a human being. Maybe a special evening service whenever December 25th isn’t on a Sunday? No day off from work, no gifts, no trees, no Tyrannosaurus Rexes wearing Santa Claus hats, just a special service of reflection, repentance, celebration, dedication, and so forth.
What do you think would happen? Would the church be full for that service? Half-full? Would anyone come at all? How long before Christmas became about as big a deal in everyday people’s lives as, say, Pentecost or Christ the King Sunday is now? How long before it was forgotten?
I confess I get a lot of enjoyment teasing my very Biblicist, near-fundamentalist Christian friends, co-workers, students, etc., about their Christmas trees. “When,” I ask, “did Jesus ever say, ‘If you love me, bring a tree inside your house’?” After I get them to admit they’re making things up, just like those liturgical, Orthodox, or Roman Catholic folk they tend to deplore, I then probe further: “What do you suspect Jesus would say if He was here, and, seeing someone dragging a tree into their house, asked them why, and was told, ‘We do this because of you, Jesus!’? Would he approve? Or would he suggest there were better ways to express our thankfulness? If he came to a church and saw the tree and all the decorations, would he wink and give a thumbs up, or would he have an overturning-of-the-money changers’-tables moment?”
Back to the holidays and cultural literacy. Some holidays get remembered and some don’t. Is it cynical to note that the holidays whose meaning is at least dimly remembered have distinctive tokens associated with them? Usually something special to eat (turkey, ham, chocolate rodents), or things that demand your attention if you’re celebrating or not (fireworks), and that the holidays with no special consumables (Labor Day, Epiphany, etc.) get forgotten? And furthermore, that the one holiday that has it all (the tree, the food, the decorations and songs and endless reams of stuff, stuff, stuff of every kind) is the most remembered of all? Indeed, our economy revolves around it, doesn’t it? They say we spend billions every year just on decorations. I’d love to know how many families of modest means have their credit scores damaged by their efforts to ensure their children have all the stuff our capitalist Christmas demands.
We have to draw lines, or I like to, anyway. I got a bit worked-up (I’m sure a bit too worked-up for my fellow elders at the meeting) the year it was announced during a worship service, from the same place where we read and preach the Word of God, that “Santa Claus will be coming to church next week!” I thought it was obvious that talking about Jesus and Santa Claus in the same way at the same time and in the same place might confuse some of the youngsters. But my argument wasn’t as obvious as I thought it should be. My objections were met with the very-difficult-to-respond-to, “But, it’s fun!” (It’s for reasons such as this that I’m increasingly anti-fun, in fact. A rant for another day, however.)
It’s a paradox. As you probably know, Christmas wasn’t always the very-big-deal it is today. Puritans once outlawed it, Congress met on Christmas day, people weren’t going into debt like they were the Pentagon just to celebrate it. Then came John Wanamaker with his new department store in Philadelphia and his need to boost sales during the cold and gloomy winters, and soon, Santa Claus and live camels and mistletoe and wrapping paper and all the rest were flooding America like an irresistible, all-consuming tsunami.
If you think fighting city hall is hard, try fighting the North Pole.
But, as much as I hate to admit it, it is all that stuff, that puts Jesus out there. If there weren’t shopping bags, there would be no “Jesus is the Reason for the Season!” slogans plastered all over them. When else do people see or hear about Jesus when they go shopping? Should we file all of this under “Every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess”? Even the giant capitalist machine being forced to acknowledge that, by its own bottom-line values, it would be in sad shape without Christmas? Without, in other words, Jesus? And that Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Santa Claus hat on someone’s front lawn I pass twice a day? Is that his knee bowing, his tongue confessing, too?
John H. Haas teaches U.S. history at Bethel University in Indiana.
Image: Jerry Stratton / http://hoboes.com/Mimsy / CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)