“Unplug the Christmas Machine!”
Aiken Unitarian Universalist Church
Sunday December 4, 2011
Dr Gaye Ortiz
Warning! There are a lot of people – mainly conservative Christians – intent on ‘taking back’ Christmas. The assault on the phrase ‘happy holidays’ has been one part of this campaign – remember how we’re told that Merry Christmas is the correct greeting. Another part that began a couple of years ago was when one holiday décor company began advertising the CHRISTmas tree – an artificial Christmas tree with a giant cross where the trunk should be.
Now some of us may know that the cross did not become the dominant symbol of Christianity until about the 9th century – so the CHRISTmas tree is an interesting mix: the Christmas tree is a nice, happy symbol of decorating and gift giving – the ultimate gift of a baby being born and the star of Bethlehem and angels singing. The cross is a grim reminder of that baby’s eventual end as a betrayed prophet.
What is it that rings your bell about Christmas? Is it a bell of joy or of alarm? Do you feel an increasing dread about this time of year because you realize the enormity of gearing up for a pre-Christmas marathon of shopping, cooking, cleaning, decorating?
Figure 1. Unplug the Christmas Machine http://www.harpercollins.com/harperimages/isbn/medium/5/9780688109615.jpg
Well this morning’s sermon is inspired by a book called ‘Unplug the Christmas Machine’, written by Jo Robinson and Jean Coppock Staeheli back in 1982 and revised in 1991. If anything, the power of the Christmas machine has increased since then; there are more commercial messages that appear “as promises that bring tears to our eyes” (10).
But back to the reminders that Jesus is the reason for the season: look at the history of Christmas, and you might come to another conclusion! If we go back to 336 A.D. we see that December 25th to the Romans was a festival day. The end of year celebrations that honored Mithras as the God of Light, and Saturn as the harvest god, were echoed by other harvest season festivals across Europe. Europeans made special foods, decorated their homes, gave gifts, sang and danced…and continued to do so as Christians! So the reign of Constantine, who dedicated the Roman Empire to Christ, legitimized the festivities but gave them another focus, so that by 1100 A.D. Christmas was the most important religious festival in Europe. Add to that the feast of St Nicholas, who distributed gifts to children, and the month of December was a whirlwind of Advent celebration. (Taking IT Global, www.tigweb.org/youth-media/panorama/article.html?ContentID=6722&print=true)
In the early 20th century Christmas shopping became increasingly important when companies began the manufacture of Christmas ornaments, lights and Christmas cards, and correspondingly stores and shops began to hire extra employees during the season to handle the increased sales. This year’s holiday spending is estimated to rise slightly from last year by about 3%, according to a Gallup survey of November spending – each of us expects to spend $764 for gifts (www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/commentaries/Gallup-Holiday-Spending-Survey-111116.php ).
And now we’re to the point – as you might have seen reported this week – that it would cost us over 101 thousand dollars to buy everything mentioned in the song ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’! The price hike from last year’s cost of $97 thousand is mainly due to the sky-high cost of the partridges and the turtle doves, both of which have seen double-digit price hikes in the past year.
There is a serious point to this – a fraction of the money Americans spend in stores just in the month of December would supply the entire world with clean water. This figure comes from Rick McKinley, a pastor from Oregon, who is one of the leaders of the Advent Conspiracy, a movement that has 1500 member churches and organizations, as well as over 45,000 fans on Facebook. The Advent Conspiracy offers an alternative to how Christians spend their Christmas shopping money – they are urged to spend, but by giving donations to organizations such as Living Water International, which digs wells in developing countries.
Now UUs might see themselves in a bit of a quandary here: we might agree that consumerism is the American Mammon and therefore a Bad Thing; but do we want to align ourselves with conservative Christians who cast ‘secular consumerism’ as the enemy? The Rev David Bumbaugh writes:
“…the commercialism of the season and the secular quality of the season are equally ancient. The Saturnalia was an aggressively secular celebration in which all the ordinary rules and expectations of society were overturned, in which traditional pieties were mocked and traditional virtues flouted. The Kalends Festival was dominated by conspicuous consumption. [] Libanius, a non-Christian philosopher of the fourth century, [] details the extravagance with which the rich and the poor alike strove to celebrate the occasion. And as early as the fourth century, Christians were denouncing the Kalends festival for its commercialism and its lack of a concern for spiritual values. Thus, our discomfort with this ancient seasonal festival is older than Christmas itself, and elements which provoke that discomfort have not changed much over the centuries.” (www.trumbore.org/sam/sermons/sac1.htm )
Well if we are really uncomfortable, we might cast our lot not with the conservative Christians but with the social activists who came up with “Buy Nothing Day,” which this year was November 25/26 – Black Friday and Saturday. The first “Buy Nothing Day” came in 1992 in Vancouver Canada, created by the anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters, to help people reflect upon the issue of over-consumption. Last summer, the longtime editor of Adbusters, Kalle Lasn, felt that the Arab spring uprising and the convulsions felt by some of the world economies might herald an opportunity to tap into the frustration simmering in the circles of the American political left.
So building on the smaller “Buy Nothing Day” campaign, he decided to create and brand a larger campaign. On July 13, he and his colleagues created a new hash tag on Twitter: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET.
Figure 3http://robj98168.blogspot.com/2011/11/buy-nothing-day.html
Since the “Buy Nothing” campaign began in 1992, people in more than 65 nations have participated each Black Friday with public protest, engaging in activities like:
- A credit card cut up: people stand in a shopping center or mall with a pair of scissors and a poster inviting shoppers to put an end to their mounting debt with just one snip. OR…
- A Zombie walk: zombies wander around the mall with a blank stare and in this reflect the faces of the shoppers, their fellow zombies – when they are asked what they are doing they explain Buy Nothing Day. OR…
- The whirl-mart, where participants push their shopping carts around in a silent conga line without putting anything in the carts.
But the biggest Buy Nothing Day activities have a philanthropic flavor: the winter coat exchanges that occur in several states have locations where coats are collected and anyone who needs a coat is welcome to take one. (Wikipedia)
So there is a growing movement from different corners in our country to get away from the over-consumption that seems to plague Christmas, but are we fighting against something that – to be honest - we consider to be as American as apple pie? To quote Dave Barry, “Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice” (http://thinkexist.com/quotation/once_again-we_come_to_the_holiday_season-a_deeply/202544.html). Or is chronic shopping a gender thing, genetic in women? To quote Elayne Boosler: “When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It's a whole different way of thinking.” (http://thinkexist.com/quotation/when_women_are_depressed-they_eat_or_go_shopping/205590.html)
Or should we consider over-consumption to be accepted as just human nature? To quote Rebecca Parker, ‘Economically, the dominant worldview regards human beings as self-interested individuals, motivated only by their personal desire to consume” (Blessing the World, 147).
Recent research into Christmas shopping has uncovered an affinity that some shoppers have with fairy tales. They “seriously enjoy Christmas gift shopping” because they see the activity as a consumer fairy tale “in which consumers employ magical agents, donors and helpers to overcome villains and obstacles as they seek out goods and services in their quest for happy endings”. ‘Triumph over hardship’ is a major theme of fairy tales, and so the challenge of having the perfect Christmas involves some of the same types of struggles and sacrifices as can be seen in Jack and the Beanstalk or Hansel and Gretel (http://news.illinois.edu/news/03/1211xmas.html).
Researchers from the University of Illinois and the University of Texas tracked four women for 7 years as they did their Christmas shopping, and then interviewed them about their “Christmas lives”. They found that the women were not content to have a ‘tolerable’ Christmas, but instead tried to outdo themselves each year, to create a more memorable Christmas than the previous year – a ‘fairy tale Christmas’. This term to them meant a Christmas in which they seek ‘happy endings for their celebrations, like those fairy tales that end with a joyous family reunion, the acquisition of precious goods, or recognition for creativity and cleverness’ (http://news.illinois.edu/news/03/1211xmas.html). Using the terminology of fairy tales, these shoppers, who could be cast as ‘heroines’ in their shopping experiences, had ‘helpers’ like Santa, (typically their mothers). And sometimes the ‘villains’, who interfered in different ways with the heroines’ ‘quest’ for harmonious family celebrations, were their fathers.
The key to this study seems to be what makes these shoppers happy: Ezra Klein, writing in The Prospect about Christmas consumerism, says that when he reflects at Thanksgiving on what he is thankful for, “no matter how much cool stuff I purchase…all I remember…are people” (www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=winning_the_rat_race_by_quitting_it). He goes on to quote an economist at the London School of Economics, Richard Layard, who is a professor in the emerging field of ‘happiness studies’ and is the author of Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (Penguin, 2005). Professor Layard says, “Family, colleagues, community – we are basically social animals, and most of our enjoyment comes from other people”.
This desire to be happy, funnily enough, is what drives us to want the holidays to be wonderful – because we love our family and friends so much. And this drive is manifested in an unstoppable force in our culture, what Jo Robinson and Jean Coppock Staeheli call ‘the Christmas Machine.’ According to their book Unplug the Christmas Machine:
The Christmas Machine has this power over us because it knows how to woo us; it speaks to the deepest, profoundest, and most sacred desires of the human heart. If it appeared as a monster, we would rise up and stop it. But the commercial messages of Christmas appear as promises that bring tears to our eyes.
Look at the bounty we are promised by the December magazines and the glowing Christmas commercials: Our families will be together and happy...Our children will be well-behaved and grateful...Our wives will be beautiful and nurturing...Our husbands will be kind, generous, and appreciative...We will have enough money...We will have enough time...We will have fun...We will be warm...We will be safe...We will be truly loved.
No wonder we stop, we listen, and we want to believe. The problem comes when we buy into the notion that what we long for can be procured by the buying and selling of goods...[we believe] that if we buy and receive more Christmas presents our inner lives will be fuller, and we will finally be safe in the world... (10-11)
The vulnerability that we carry within us is exploited by the Christmas machine, and we can’t help wanting to please our loved ones, especially in these types of scenarios:
The working mother who lives day in and day out with the nagging feeling that she should be doing more for her children is an easy target. When she sees an ad that tells her she can ensure her daughter’s happy memories by buying a hundred-dollar doll, she is extraordinarily open to the suggestion.
The husband whose self-esteem is fragile because he’s just been passed over for a promotion may find himself going into debt to buy diamond earrings for his wife as a testimony to his ability to provide. (Preface)
Unplug the Christmas Machine suggests that there is an elaborate, unspoken code that governs our gift giving during the holiday season. Listening to these ten hidden rules of gift-giving may be instructive and sound familiar to a lot of us:
The Ten Hidden Gift-giving Rules:
1 Give a gift to everyone you expect to get one from
2 If someone gives you a gift unexpectedly, reciprocate that year
3 When you add a name to your gift list, give that person a gift every year thereafter
4 The amount of money you spend on a gift determines how much you care about the recipient
5 Gifts exchanged between adults should be roughly equal in value
6 The presents you give to someone should be fairly consistent in value over the years
7 If you give a gift to a person in one category (e.g. a co-worker or neighbor), give a gift to everyone in that category, and these gifts should be similar in value
8 Women should give gifts to their close women friends
9 Men should not give gifts to their male friends – unless those gifts are alcoholic beverages
10 Whenever the above rules cause you any difficulty, remedy the situation by buying more gifts (92)
Some of these seem to be tongue-in-cheek, but most of us recognize how these rules can complicate our lives. It can make for an awkward social situation if we don’t play by these rules!
Figure 4http://simplyxmas.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/victorian_christmas.jpg
When we begin to examine what motivates us in our efforts to create the fairy tale Christmas, we can quickly see that unplugging our Christmas machine needs, as Baldrick, in the British comedy Blackadder, says, ‘a cunning plan’. The key to unplugging the machine is knowing what you REALLY want, according to Robinson and Staeheli. Do we want to change some of the ways we celebrate Christmas and, in particular, some of the ways we are driven to behave when buying gifts?
Unplug the Christmas Machine suggests that we take four steps toward making any change to our upcoming Christmas celebration. First, we realize that any plan we make will not be our only instrument of change; we shouldn’t feel that it is set in stone, because there may be other changes that are spontaneous, and any moment-by-moment decisions may well add to your enjoyment of the celebration.
Second, set small and specific goals. We can’t change everything at once and people need time to adjust to new ideas. Our traditions and rituals are important, and they play a special role in our lives, which are subject these days to a great deal of change and uncertainty; most people don’t want to completely transform the way they celebrate Christmas; they may only want to clear away a few things that have lost their meaning or look at how they can add more depth and meaning to established rituals (132).
Third, planning takes time, and if you start in mid-summer you can plan some fairly detailed changes and talk to all family members about them. If however you start on the 4th of December, you need to keep your focus on changes that can be put into action at the last minute, like adding a family walk the day after Christmas to help everyone wind down from the excitement of Christmas Day.
Fourth, you’ll have a good chance of success if you either focus on a goal that you can accomplish independently, or on one that has the likely support of everyone. Robinson and Staeheli give this example: …if you are bothered by a relative’s excessive drinking you will probably be frustrated if you define your goal this way: “I would like to encourage my father to drink less this Christmas”. A more realistic goal statement is: “I would like to add activities to our celebration that would take the emphasis off drinking”. This second goal would be more achievable for you to accomplish even without your father’s cooperation. (132) Your goals need to be realistic, have support from those people who are involved, and you should still be able to enjoy all those parts of your Christmas celebration that still have strong emotional appeal to you and others (133).
So how do you phrase your goals? Well, when Unplug the Christmas Machine has been used as a tool for workshops, people have come up with statements like:
I want to minimize Christmas preparations
I want to feel more relaxed this holiday season
I want to simplify my gift giving
I want to spend more relaxed time with my children this Christmas
I want to give less commercial gifts
How are you going to reach goals like these? Look at your goals and think of one or two activities that will help you achieve them: what are you going to do and when should it be done? For example, if you want to simplify gift-giving, then you might contact the other family members who are usually present for gift-giving in plenty of time for changing the pattern, asking them to agree to only give gifts to the children at the upcoming Christmas celebration.
If you want to spend more relaxed time with your children – big or small – think of activities you and others have enjoyed in past holiday seasons: card playing, game playing, singing, reading aloud to each other, attending concerts, winter sports, telling stories about the family, cooking together, going for walks. Which of these would you like to do this year? Many of us realize that we often neglect many of our favorite activities at Christmas. Adding just one enjoyable tradition is sometimes all it takes to have a more rewarding celebration (96).
So maybe if we are interested in making our celebrations in the holiday season even more meaningful – or if we want to unplug the Christmas machine – then what better place to start than with the Christmas pledge? Unplug the Christmas Machine offers us this pledge:
The Christmas Pledge
Believing in the true spirit of Christmas,
I commit myself to
Remember those people who truly need my gifts
Express my love in more direct ways than gifts
Examine my holiday activities in the light of my deepest values
Be a peacemaker within my circle of family and friends
Rededicate myself to my spiritual growth. (13)
Figure 5http://www.dearskysteward.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Man-pledge.jpg
The Christmas Pledge asks us to commit ourselves to remembering those who are in real need of gifts; the efforts of the Advent Conspiracy, which I mentioned earlier, aim to do just this, asking people to spend their money on water projects in developing countries.
The pledge asks us to commit ourselves to express our love in more direct ways than gifts – the Beatles sure had it right when they sang, ‘Money can’t buy me love’!
The pledge asks us to commit ourselves to examine our holiday activities in the light of our deepest values: we can begin to do this when we come up with a plan to make our celebrations more meaningful to ourselves and to those we love.
The pledge asks us to be peacemakers among our family and friends – we can begin to do this when we disregard the often problematic social code of gift-giving; we can spare ourselves and others distress, embarrassment, resentment and conflict.
And the pledge asks us to rededicate ourselves to spiritual growth: whatever your faith perspective leads you to feel about Christmas, it can be seen as a time of new birth – as Sophia Lyons Fahs writes: ‘…each night a child is born is a holy night, a time for singing, a time for wondering, a time for worshipping’ (“For So the Children Come,” http://www.seafarerpress.com/works/for_so_the_children_come.html )
The holiday season is also a time in many faith traditions of light in the midst of darkness – as with Hanukah and Solstice, and we have a ‘Blue Christmas’ service coming up on the 19th that will explore that theme further.
The holiday season is also a time in many faith traditions of light in the midst of darkness – as with Hanukah and Solstice, and we have a ‘Blue Christmas’ service coming up on the 19th that will explore that theme further.
In closing, the Christmas pledge asks us to believe in the true spirit of Christmas – and as we sing in the Advent hymn “O Come O Come Emmanuel,” this will be with us when love, truth, light and hope come to dwell. These are the gifts of Christmas that matter most, and in the words of Richard S Gilbert: “Gifts that matter have no weight” (Rejoice Together, 81).
Blessed be, Amen, May it be so.
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