Celebrating Christmas
December 13, 2010
“Christmas can continue to be celebrated in Western societies as a holiday for all, but then it makes no sense to complain that it has become too lay, too mundane, that is, that it has been deprived of its original, authentic meaning.”
- Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity
Discuss.
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6 Comments
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Agreed.
In the US, especially, we see Evangelical groups demanding that every store give lip service to Christmas, knowing full well that retailers aren’t celebrating Christ’s birth.
If we want Christmas to be regarded as special and meaningful, then we have to understand that it is separate and distinct from the vacant culture.
There is a secular holiday that occurs on December 25, marked by drinking too much, eating too much, giving too many presents paid for with too much debt, and singing “Santa Baby” (perhaps my least favorite holiday song). Then there’s Christmas.
Blurring that line can only hurt the celebration of the real meaning of Christmas.
There is a secular holiday that occurs on December 25, marked by drinking too much, eating too much, giving too many presents paid for with too much debt, and singing “Santa Baby” (perhaps my least favorite holiday song). Then there’s Christmas.
Careful here! This is eerily similar to the critique of Christmas advanced by New England Protestants, and used as an excuse for suppressing the observance of the holiday by Catholic immigrants. Everybody is different, but I mark the feast by eating and drinking too much, among other things. This is not in opposition to the fundamental religious nature of the day: as the antiphons for Gaudete Sunday remind us: “Rejoice! I say again, Rejoice!”
I have greater and greater difficulty trying to figure out what we’re trying to preserve as I get older. There is just such a contrast between this is holy time and we must keep it sacred and Christmas isn’t the most important day on the Christian calendar. The great temptation, to strip everything extraneous from December 25th, doesn’t get us closer to the real® Christmas and actually moves us somewhat away from it given that Christmas is a festive time in the Church calendar. Perhaps we should be bothered by other people celebrating with us even though they aren’t necessarily doing so for the right reason, but that doesn’t seem to make much sense either. It would be like complaining about Muslims praying to Mary.
For me, Christmas bothers me because of the materialism. I just don’t participate in that. It isn’t that difficult, because we don’t participate in that the other 364 days of the year. And while I don’t particularly enjoy this time of year, I have decided that my curmudgeonly self is more to blame than Christmas. Not being able to take pleasure when others are taking pleasure isn’t a sign of virtue, and I’m afraid many of us tend to act that way under the guise of righteous anger.
MZ, I know I reached that point. I got so frustrated with the way that Christmas is commonly celebrated that it affected the way I celebrated it. Net result, no one was celebrating it right. Now I take a kind of Kantian approach, and do what I wish everyone would do.
Is Christmas really celebrated as “a holiday for all?” I don’t think so. I don’t think that the fact that it’s a federal holiday means that everyone celebrates it. And I certainly don’t think it means that we are somehow obtuse when we decry the total desacralization of the holy day. But if Christmas’s status as a federal holiday means that it is “a holiday for everyone”, it’s unclear to me how this should affect our understanding, or for that matter, anyone else’s understanding, of what the day is. In other words, the significance of Christmas stands apart from how it is celebrated, and also how it ought to be celebrated. I think this is a rhetorically flush way of making a silly point.
Yep. I worded badly. I was trying to focus on materialism and excess, not mere celebration, in my criticism.