September, 2005: Christmas Has Come and Gone

by Mark Morelli
September 19, 2005

I am part of the marketing team that creates the advertising for a chain of nearly 900 craft and fabric supplies retail stores.

For the past few weeks, the only thing I've been thinking about is Christmas season shopping and sales.

It is just a few days after Labor Day. We are wrapping up our Christmas advertising projects. I'm wrung out. I'm thrilled that Christmas is almost over.

This is how Christmas affects many Americans. I simply have a jump start on the exhaustion and weary anxiety.

Give "Money" Christmas It's Own Name
Christmas is all about the savior. That is, the cross-your-fingers "savior" of late fiscal year sales that will help stores reach their sales goals. Our capitalist system needs Christmas more than Christians.

Nonetheless, the Christmas that is about "money" ought to be separated from the Christmas that is intended to be a solemn commemoration of Christ's birth, although I think the solemnity of Christmas probably lasted about five minutes, 600 years ago. We should face facts and make the "money" Christmas, which I'll Giftmas, into just that: a weeks-long celebration of gift-gifting for the hell of it.

(This idea came to me when I was thinking about how, last November, conservative religious groups spearheaded an initiative that placed on the Ohio ballot an amendment to the state constitution to prevent gay marriages. They believe that marriage is a sacrament before God. However, they did not put any language in this amendment which bars atheists from marrying. That leads me to believe that we ought to take government out of the marriage business altogether, leave that to the churches, and let civil unions be the legal bond that unites adults who are committed to each other. Why tangle up their destinies in the bylaws of organizations that don't want them in the first place?

Giftmas could satisfy our desire to buy gifts (and receive them!) without stirring up all the hypocrisy about the commercialism of Christmas. True, that ruins the poignant message of "A Charlie Brown Christmas," but then consider how Charles Schulz himself hawked his precious characters for licensing of many products, including endorsements for Metlife insurance for going on decades now.

Christmas Is a Mental Theme Park
Christmas has so many connotations that, for many, the birth and life of Christ gets bumped down on the list. We conjure the smell of cinnamon, the silver bells-ish carols, the gawdy TV show. We find solace in the Currier & Ives sleighs and Victorian villages, a pure nostalgia for a life we never knew much as Disney's Main Street USA was pretty much gone by the time Nixon resigned. Our longing for small towns, farmhouses and sleigh rides is healthy enough but only this longing gives us respite from our daily lives of nerves lurching from traffic jams, job layoffs and the Babel of 187 cable channels. In that sense, the holiday engages our fantasy for simplicity and peace.

Giftmas Will Lift A Burden From Angry Christians
Last year, USA Today reported that some Christians were upset that store clerks tended to say "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas" to customers. This, said the irate people, was another instance of removing "Christ" from Christmas.

These were at stores, mind you, where even Christ himself probably doesn't expect a very high ranking in the consciousness of the frazzled, crabby, overspending consumers. Wrong battlefield, Christian soldiers. At the mall, it isn't Christmas . . . it's Giftmas, which oughtn't concern Christians, and will free them up to concentrate on feeding the hungry.

So Merry Giftmas!
So in the season of mince pies, let us not mince words, and call the capitalism compulsion what it is: Let's call it Giftmas! and separate it from Christmas. Only then can Christmas become the quiet, reflective and restorative religious holiday it ought to be. It may be such a holiday for much fewer professed Christians, but at least we'll know the wheat from the chaff.

For pure family togetherness and a quiet expression of gratitude for your blessings, look to Thanksgiving, which hasn't been corrupted by capitalism and remains our truest religious holiday in that it encourages action (sharing and brotherhood) over creed. And for those who don't want to even share . . . they can watch football and bother nobody.