To resist the Christmas consumerist habit, let's renew celebration of Day of the Kings - Column

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 7, 1997 by Rosemary Radford Ruether

Last month I completed the annual Christmas ritual by taking down the now dry Christmas tree and packing up the ornaments. The thought occurred to me as we cleaned up the trail of dry pine needles, "Another tree killed." I had just read a chapter in a book on Christian social thought in which the author referred to the Western habit of "suicidal consumerist individualism has been turned into -- an expression of Western consumerist individualism, the primary world today?"

I have long had uneasy feelings about the shopping orgy as the prime way of celebrating Christmas in America. When I was 17 and editor of my high school paper in La Jolla, calif., I wrote an editorial in which I criticized the commercialization of Christmas. I don't remember what I said, but what stands out in my memory is that a retired naval officer in out town contacted the principal of the school to complain that our newspaper was "subversive and communist," citing my editorial as a case in point. This was 1953, at the height of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunts.

The principal called in our student editorial staff to tell us of this complaint and assure us of his support. We left feeling rather important. Imagine, "communist subversives" as teenagers! But it astonished me that a member of our military could connect this charge with an editorial critizing the commercialization of Christmas, a theme likely to appear in a sermon of our not very radical parish priest.

A clue to how :" un-American" such criticism might appear was suggested to me by several TV programs last December in which media and business leaders discussed the percentage of the year's sales expected from Christmas shopping. The danger that people might not buy as much as usual was examined in ominous tones. One was almost made to feel guilty for not being out there shopping, as if such a "failure" was a frontal assault on the American economy.

Despite early condemnation as a "communist subversive," I have continued to make small gestures toward reduction of my participation in christmas consumerism as I became a parent. One year when my kids were small, we searched out an impoverished family with five children living in a damp basement in our city (then Washington, D.C.) and made ourselves their Santa Claus. Our family continued the relationship with this other family for several years, helping them rent and fix up more suitable housing.

I have tried other way of resisting the Christmas consumer habit: helping out with dinners at shelters, collecting gifts for the American Indian Center in Chicago, giving alternative gifts. Some years my children and relatives found cards from the Heifer project under their trees saying that a pair of rabbits, a dozen chickens or a piglet had been donated to a poor Third World family in their name. One year my husband, a daughter and I gathered dozens of stuffed toys, along with medicine, and took them to desperately poor squatter settlement on the outskirts of Guatemala City to be distributed on el Dia de los Magos, the Day of the Kings, the traditional gift-giving day in Latin America. In other years similar collections were taken to refugee camps in Palestine.

These little gestures feel to me like token ways of slaving a bad conscience. What we really need is a mass movement that rejects turning the celebration of the coming of God's saving presence into an orgy of consumerism typifying injustice in a world rent by increasing gaps of wealth and poverty, affluence and misery. Parties and family gatherings for the sharing of food and gifts -- these surely are not wrong. They express the joy and plenitude that is part of God's presence. But that celebration needs to be linked with ongoing work for justice, for real peace on earth.

Perhaps we might start by start by resisting the commercial Christmas shopping cycle and consciously grounding ourselves in the Advent and Christmas cycle of the church year. This means refusing to make Advent a shopping time, but rather a time of real preparation of our hearts for Gods's presence, engaging in various activities related to sharing wealth and happiness with others, especially the most neglected. We might then redevelop our observance of Christmas so that it really extends from Christmas Eve to Epiphany and ends with the Baptism of Christ on the following Sunday. We might return to the ancient Christian custom (still practiced throughout the Spanish-speaking world) of giving our gifts on the day of the Kings, rather than on Christmas, thereby opting out of the commercial pattern that packs up Christmas on Dec. 26.

We might also turn to our Jewish neighbors at this season by attending synagogue with them and remembering with them that the coming of the Messiah in God's reign of peace and justice is not yet here and that we Christians have been poor representatives of the Christian vision for the last 2,000 years, especially for Jews. To resist Christmas consumerism must be more than a token gesture to appease a bad conscience. It should be a major way of saying no to evil and yes to ways more appropriate to the redeeming presence of God in our midst.