This is part of an article published 35 years ago in US Catholic Magazine. It is still so relevant, maybe even more so now. Why do we race around the week before Christmas buying expensive gifts as if it were a rite of preparation for the coming of the Lord? Jesus did not say we would recognize him in the breaking of the bank. And in fact it becomes very difficult to recognize him when we spend most of the season fighting crowds and fatigue.
Mostly we get trapped. It’s not that we intend to be swept up by the needless overconsumption of the season. It’s that we haven’t stopped to think about the season ahead of time and make sense of it. We haven’t stopped to choose what kind of Christmas we would like to have.
We’ve been trapped into thinking we have to act in a certain way during the season. Advertisers pull out the heavy artillery at Christmas, bombarding us with messages that say, “The only way to celebrate is to buy these shiny, expensive gifts.”
But Christmas is for sharing. We’re remembering, reliving, celebrating the moment in history when our God shared himself by entering humanity and living with us, as us.
Often that sense of sharing is lost in the helter-skelter rush to prepare for Christmas. We are pressed for time; it is all we can do to get through our foot-long gift lists. We don’t have time for people; we’re not able to pay much attention to their needs at a time when those needs might be most critical.
Maybe that’s why so many people experience a profound sense of loneliness at Christmas. It’s a kind of cruel reversal of the point of Christmas in the first place. The least it could do is cheer us out of our winter doldrums. Instead it seems to intensify them.
Is there a way off the mad Christmas merry-go-round? It’s difficult, maybe impossible, to make a change alone. The cycle of rushing and spending, spending and rushing, is imbedded in our culture. Going against the grain alone is a very unpopular thing to do. Friends might be hurt at not receiving the kind of gifts they are used to receiving; family members might resent your refusal to “pull your fair share” in the gigantic Christmas effort. You might come off as a stingy, lazy humbug.
The only hope of regaining Christmas is to do so in community. It can start with the family, the core of the Christmas celebration, sitting down and talking about what has gone wrong with the season. Common themes begin to emerge: too many gifts, too much money spent, too much time and energy for all the wrong things, too much work and not enough Jesus.
Kurt Hilgefort, is a Catholic father of six who publishes his thoughts on his blog Shadows of Augustine . He responded to my seven question survey with the following answers. Kurt is the first layperson to respond to the seven question survey and I think that his experience is extremely relevant to me personally and I hope that you are inspired by his thoughts as well. If you would like to respond, please send an email to fellmananthony@gmail.com with your thoughts and I will be happy to publish them as well. 1. What is the biggest challenge to your faith that you have faced so far? The biggest challenge for me has been the whole dying to self thing. On an intellectual level, there are no barriers. It comes down to a matter of accepting the authority of the Church that Christ founded upon Peter. My challenge is not in the intellect, but rather in the will. The challenge for me has always been to continually seek conversion. I want to be transformed, but I want it to be over all ...
