Black Friday – A Prelude To Christmas
Today is Black Friday. It’s kind of an ironically appropriate name to the god of consumerism. Black Friday is a reference to today, which is the day after Thanksgiving and one of the biggest shopping days of the year. The term was coined by the press after the stress it causes people and was named after the Black Tuesday stock market crass of 1929. Niiice.
My wife and are deeply wrestling with Christmas this year. To be honest we don’t really want to participate. It has almost completely lost any semblance of meaning for us and we’re looking for alternatives. A friend of mine talked about taking a van load of gifts to a Mexican orphanage this year and my heart leaped. The trip would have meant missing any Christmas with extended family but I really didn’t care. And when my sister told me that we weren’t doing Christmas with the them this year, I had nothing standing in my way. Unfortunately the trip didn’t materialize so I was bummed.
Rick McKinley’s Imago Dei Community church created Advent Conspiracy, as an alternative to the typical consumer oriented Christmas of buying a million gift. I really like the idea and we’re looking into it as an alternative. AC is about giving, not presents. It’s about capturing the spirit of what Christmas is really about by making Christmas gifts and then giving the rest of the “Xmas budget” to a clean water project.
“Advent Conspiracy is an international movement restoring the scandal of Christmas by worshipping Jesus through compassion, not consumption”
There it is, that word: consumption. Christmas is a big deal in this country. Shoppers are expected to purchase 454 billion dollars in November and December. Consumption is critical to keeping our economy humming. But is all of that consumption producing what we expected? It consumption making us bloated at the expense of something else? It is completely fair to say that I don’t need a single thing I would ever get from UNDER the Christmas tree.
I wrestle with letting go of the Christmas “traditions” because I know some of my favorite memories are of my childhood Christmas experiences. I don’t want to take the value of the holiday away from my three kids. But even those memories, with closer inspection, I realize are more about family that the gifts. The only gifts I can really truly remember as special were a G.I Joe and a bike.
The memories that really stick out to me have nothing to do with the presents. The best ones were hanging out with family. I remember the long drives on Christmas Eve morning to Los Angeles to my grandparents house. I remember hanging out with all my cousins and playing endless hours with people. The presents were fun but it was the people that I remember the most. Even later in life, I remember the 27 person dinner table conversations filled with laughter. One thing my family knew how to do was laugh.
And two things really sticks out to me. The first was that my mom always invited someone to Christmas Eve, which was the big night in my family. And she was so good about making them feel so special and part of our family. When I was young this felt awkward, but as I grew older I began to see that she got what Christmas was really about, the deep need for connection. The second was that the “gift” really didn’t do much for me. Yes it was cool to get the latest shirt all my friends had or the Star Wars collectible set with 367 pieces, but to a great extent the newness wore off very quickly and that thing that I got ceased to become the center of my attention withing days. I see this same process happen in my children.
The more I look at Christmas, and Black Friday, the more I wonder if Christmas has taken on a new meaning. In the endless drive to fill the tree with presents, has it become a way to compensate for our lack of connection as human beings? Do we give the endless stream of gifts as a way of saying sorry for the lack of connection throughout the year? Has it become the only way we know how to connect, through the process of giving gifts. Has it become a forced ritual that leaves us wanting? And in the end, do all of the gifts leave us as sick as when we started?
If you have a really good alternative idea for Christmas, I’d really like to hear it. My family and my soul would really be interested.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
-
raquelamisto
-
Aaron G.
-
jon lMl holmes
-
Ian
-
Paul
-
ChristopherCocca
