23 December 2013

Christmas and Consumerism or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Giving

It is pretty easy these days to mock the excesses of Christmas. The stores opening on Thanksgiving, five year-olds asking for iPhones, the Best Buy commercial where an aunt gives her nieces tablets (seriously? I am from a fairly wealthy family, but I don't recall ever getting anything from an aunt nor would I expect anything), and the way the birth of Jesus is tied into people going into debt. The critiques write themselves and are so, so boring. Yes, we get it anti-consumerists, you don't want to buy things for people. Could you please just quiet down about it? Left hand and right hand not knowing each other, Pharisees praying loudly and all that.

I used to fall into the critic crowd (though I always lustily accepted whatever my parents got for me) and then I had kids. Kids make you go bananas about giving. There is nothing better in the world than giving your kids a gift. I do it all of the time. I'll see some little knick-knack that no one alive really needs and get it for Owen because I love to give him stuff. We bought him a Strider bike for Christmas and I kept it at work so he wouldn't see it before the big day. For the past two weeks I have walked past that thing multiple times every day and broken out into a mile-wide grin. I can't wait to give it to him. This morning I was at the farm store getting some chicken feed for our girls and bought him four little animal toys because they had giraffes and he loves giraffes. And then I got him a horse, too, because he has a rocking horse upstairs that he likes to ride while I ride next to him on the rocking chair (we ride to the duck pond to feed the ducks and go fishing). His horse is named Lucky, and my rocking chair is named Lightning. He told me last night that instead of flying to Hawaii we should ride horses. "A fine, strong black horse," he told me. Who am I to disagree?

My parents get this better than anyone. They don't sit around fretting about the creeping consumerism of Christmas--they just give and give and give. If you want to break out of the secularizing impulse of our American incarnation of the holiday you don't do it by refraining  from giving. We are celebrating in this season the greatest gift of all time and all of our gifts are mere whispers, dull, petty imitations of that great gift God gave us in his Son, but we give them anyway to remind ourselves of that great gift. 

I am not trying to sanctify all giving that is done in the name of Christmas. Some is probably irresponsible. I don't advocate debt. Some is done with ulterior motives. But to me the extravagant giving is better than the self-righteous refraining that some seem to want to put in its place. Our Father has dealt with us extravagantly after all. And his generosity outstrips anything we could ever come close to matching. My answer to the consumerist conundrum, then, is to give more and give with a view to our profligately gifting God. 

Merry Christmas! Drink some eggnog.    

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