Every year I turn into the Grinch. “I must stop Christmas from coming…” till the 25th anyway.
Advent has been entirely pushed out by holiday celebrations that start even before Thanksgiving leftovers can be put away. There’s still the chocolate countdown calendar and a wreath with the usual purple and pink candles, but that’s about it. So, I engage in a futile battle to keep the external flood of holiday cheer from invading our home during Advent. But all you have to do is look across the street—Frosty is already there staring you down like a psychopath… in the middle of November.
Early Christianity had a brilliant strategy of taking on pagan celebrations and filling them with Christian meaning. It was a way to help converts enter the faith and find new meaning to their existing celebrations. But now just the opposite has happened. We have allowed the deep meaning of Christian symbols to be hijacked by the new secular gods: pleasure, entertainment, shallow emotion, and joyless revelry.
The founder of the Italian Communist party, Antonio Gramsci was deeply anti-Catholic. However, in looking at the Church he had an important insight: the things people celebrate are crucial to forming who they are, and this element of the culture impacts their worldview. So he intentionally set out to secularize Italy’s celebrations and holidays.
It succeeded.
Now that I have young kids, the depths of my grinchiness have grown. I don’t feel it’s enough to protect Advent. I have slowly begun my own personal crusade against the empty, secular elements of Christmas: the opulent gift giving instead of poverty, grandiose external displays instead of humility, the incessant music instead of silence. We pay lip service with “this is a penitential season.”
It began as I thought about Santa as the useful tool to bribe children for good behavior. In contrast, gift giving from the real St. Nick is an image of Christ’s charity that is entirely detached from merit. As St. Paul says, “while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son.” (Rm 5:10) I also think about things like the decorations on our tree, which used to be filled with Christian symbols: an apple for sin, the light of Christ, or bells of joy, and so on. The lights that once represented Christ overcoming darkness have become a meaningless neon light show.
Most everything in our modern, secular Christmas is simply an emotional reminder of a past emotional Christmas. We tolerate the emptiness of it all since it makes us happy remembering how it used to make us happy.
The funny thing about Antonio Gramsci—in the end, he died a practicing Catholic and received the sacraments before his death. Just like Gramsci, modern Christmas can be converted. Though, perhaps not in a way that can salvage it culturally. We can do what is our responsibility to do: let our families live it authentically as a help on their way to heaven. And in doing that, perhaps we may be able to impact the culture too.
