Preface Christmas and the Catholic Consumer

Preface Christmas and the Catholic Consumer As this issue arrives, you are now in the Christmas season, a season that, like a Midwestern American visit, concludes in stages. “Well, it’s probably time we left you guys alone” is followed ten minutes later by, “We’ve got an early morning.” “We’d better be off” is fif- teen minutes later and then—first standing in the living room, then crowded in the front hallway, and finally with the hosts hovering over the open window of your car—the goodbyes proper. Christmas is an eight-day liturgical feast, ending with the octave. But, to paraphrase Churchill, that octave (the feast of Mary, Mother of God) is not the end, nor even really the beginning of the end. It is more like the end of the beginning, since after the octave we reach liturgical completion at the end of twelve days of Christmas, Epiphany or the Feast of the Magi. Or, rather, it ends seven days later on Epiphany’s octave, the Feast of the Baptism of Christ. Well, okay, even to say that is the end is a bit premature: the traditional end of Christmastide since the Middle Ages has always been on the Feast of the Presentation, often known as Candlemas, on February 2. I love this delayed goodbye to the wonder of the Nativity, and not merely because I am from the American Midwest. Perhaps it’s be- logos 22:1 winter 2019 6 logos cause I discovered it as an adult when I got married and took up my wife’s older Catholic traditions of bringing in the tree and decorat- ing it on “Christmas Adam,” the day before Christmas Eve, and only having the presents appear mysteriously in the night after Midnight Mass. That tree does indeed last until Candlemas Eve, the traditional date of taking down Christmas decorations. Indeed, due to disorga- nization, my wife and I are even more Catholic than the medievals— we sometimes don’t get the things put away until even later. Growing up Protestant, I operated on the Protestant/secular Christmas calendar, which begins the weekend after Thanksgiving when Christmas trees and lights are put up; pop radio stations begin an endless loop of “Santa Baby,” “Grandma Got Run Over by a Rein- deer,” and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You”; and “Black Friday” sales bring stampeding shoppers to the malls and now the in- ternet. Though technically, commercially speaking, Christmas orna- ments and knickknacks will have been on sale since before Halloween, August or September depending on the store. December, known as the “Christmas season,” brings approximately thirty-seven Christmas parties with enough granulated sugar, booze, and fruitcakes to make one’s New Year’s dieting resolution last until at least . January 3. The end of Christmas is really somewhere in the vicinity of De- cember 27, by which time most people will have been able to cel- ebrate Christmas with all the branches of the family, including in- laws, step-family members, and even outlaws. For many, the trees will be out waiting for the recycler or trash no later than New Year’s Eve, though in northern climes the outdoor Christmas lights are al- lowed to stay because the sun is still going down at 4:40 PM. Janu- ary itself is a holy season of college basketball and a kind of Lenten preparation for the great American sports-liturgical feast known as the Super Bowl. The importance of February 2 for most Americans has more to do with Groundhog Day, which has taken on (and I’m not entirely joking here) a kind of interreligious quasi-liturgical sig- nificance mostly revolving around the brilliant1993 Harold Ramis film of the same name.1 preface 7 For most people, the Protestant/secular Christmas season, which effectively rules out any sort of season of Advent, does not lead to any great sense of happiness. Instead, Christmas is usually a season filled with sentimental childhood stories but also laments about “hol- iday blues,” stress, and overloaded schedules. Indeed, by the time Christmas day proper arrives, one already hears that people are sick of Christmas. One might observe that Thanksgiving’s belt-loosening feasting followed immediately by a month-long binge and a mad dash to buy presents for all those near, dear, and potentially useful to one does indeed make one sick of Christmas by the time it arrives. It was this reality that prompted Mollie Hemingway, a journal- ist and Lutheran minister’s daughter, to declare in 2014 that repel- ling the oft-lamented “War on Christmas”—wherein the powers of business and state encourage or even force people to not use Christmas decorations, to substitute “happy holidays” for the more common greeting “Merry Christmas,” and to sing songs related to winter weather but not the religious meaning of the season—is really dependent upon fighting “the War on Advent.”2 The War on Ad- vent essentially means the cultural imposition of the Protestant/ secular Christmas Calendar I highlighted above. Hemingway in- forms readers that Christmas parties during Advent are really bad, but if we persist in this practice, we should be mindful that many Christians have services on Wednesdays, “So pick a different day of the week for your glutton-fest during a time ostensibly set aside for fasting and prayer.” Ms. Hemingway is no shrinking violet. And I agree with her entirely. But I think her connection between the War on Advent and the War on Christmas is not explained quite deeply enough, though she hints at it in the end of the essay when she asks if we “are all clear . that liturgical seasons are very cool ways to get the proper amount of preparation and contemplation before the big celebration?” Preparation and contemplation are indeed the ways in which we prepare for the big celebration, and it’s this lack—no doubt with an unhealthy helping of loneliness brought on by family fractures and 8 logos social media addiction—that makes the widespread lack of joy during the time of joyeux Noel so prevalent. This is slightly different, but not unconnected to, the standard diagnosis of the liturgical seasonal sadness as being a matter of consumerism. “The fact is,” wrote Chitra Ramaswamy in a 2014 column in England’s Guardian newspaper, “while shoppers will on average spend around £350 on the big day, the most in Europe, we also tend to have the unhappiest children, the most out-of-whack work life/balance, and the most chronic levels of loneliness.”3 Due to loss of income, Ramaswamy was celebrating a “no-presents Christmas” for much of her family and was anxious to experience the “essential crapness” of Christmas that puts the focus back on the celebration as a family. No doubt there’s some truth to this idea that in having less stuff we might discover the gift of com- munion with the ones we love. But there’s something mechanical about this approach to consumerism that does not sit well. I have never been fond of hearing anybody accused of “consumerism,” but not because I don’t believe that it exists or that people cannot be victims or perpetrators of it. Instead, it is that “consumerism” is a kind of two-fold problem: first, in that we usually attribute it to somebody else. “Why did he spend his money on that junk? He doesn’t need that. His things own him. My things, on the other hand. .” But second, even when we do attribute it to ourselves, I think we usually define it in terms of the amount of possessions rather than the mode of holding them. There is a great deal of conceptual and spiritual clarity to be found on the problem of consumerism in The Cure for Consumerism, a short but powerful 2015 book by Fr. Gregory Jensen, an Orthodox priest and scholar in Wisconsin who combines insights from the Orthodox and Catholic social traditions (which often differ little anyway) in a vibrant and lucid manner.4 Father Jensen begins his book with an anecdote from the Desert Fathers that brilliantly expresses the root of my two concerns about consumerism. A monk who had been a poor herdsman before his monastic calling was very surprised to find a brother monk “clothed preface 9 in soft garments,” with clean feet and sandals, who slept on a fleece- covered mat and used a pillow. He even enjoyed a bit of wine with his meals! Shocked at this consumerist luxury, the herdsman-cum-monk leaves immediately. The second monk, however, calls him back and asks his story. After telling about his past as a village herdsman who usually slept on the cold ground, bathed in the river, and ate meals of “a little bread with salted fish” and a drink of water, he hears the luxurious monk declare that this was “severe hardship.” The luxurious monk’s past as a Roman elder had been a great deal more luxurious than at present. He had owned “great houses and much wealth,” dressed in fine clothes and gold, and had many servants “dancing at- tendance on him” and serving him luxurious food. As a monk, he now has only one servant, pours water on his feet instead of bathing, and prays at night instead of sinning to the music of flutes and lutes. He admits that he is a sinner and asks his brother monk not to be scandalized by his weakness. The result is that the poor monk “came to himself,” reflecting: “Ah me! It was from much adversity in this world that I came to be comfortable; and what I lacked then I now possess.

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