I've been called my share of names, but the only one that ever really stung was "grinch." The year that a few friends and I started the Hundred Dollar Holiday program through our rural Methodist churches, several business-page columnists in the local papers leveled the G-word--we were dour do-gooders, they said, bent on taking the joy out of Christmas. And, frankly, their charges sounded plausible enough. After all, we were asking our families, our friends, and our church brethren to try and limit the amount of money they spend on the holiday to a hundred dollars--to celebrate the holiday with a seventh or an eighth of the normal American materialism. There's no question that would mean fewer "Pop guns! And bicycles! Roller skates! Drums! Checkerboards! Tricycles! Popcorn! And plums!" Not to mention PlayStations, Camcorders, Five Irons, and various Obsessions. Perhaps my heart was two sizes too small.
So it was with some trepidation that I carefully reread my daughter's
well-worn copy of the Seuss classic, neatly shelved with "Green Eggs and Ham,"
"Horton Hears a Who," and all the other secular parables. There on the cover
was the Grinch himself, red eyes gleaming malevolently as he plotted the
sack of Whoville...
But of course, it didn't work. That Christmas morning, listening from his
aerie for the wailing from Whoville below, the Grinch heard instead the
sound of singing. Christmas had come. "It came without ribbons! It came
without tags! It came without packages, boxes or bags!" After puzzling three
hours till his puzzler was sore, the Grinch was forced to conclude that
Christmas came from no store.
And so I breathed a sigh of real relief. Not only was I not a grinch trying
to wreck the meaning of Christmas, it was abundantly clear who the grinches
of our culture really are: those relentless commercial forces who have spent
more than a century trying to convince us that Christmas does come from a
store, or a catalog, or a virtual mall on the internet. Every day, but
especially in the fall, they try their hardest to turn each Cindy Lou Who
into a proper American consumer--try their best to make sure her Christmas
revolves around Sony or Sega, Barbie or Elmo.
All those issues are important. But the more we worked on our little
campaign, traveling around our region having evening meetings at small rural
churches like the one I attend, the more we came to understand why people
were responding--indeed, why we had responded to the idea. It wasn't
because we wanted a simpler Christmas at all. It was because we wanted a
more joyous Christmas. We were feeling cheated--as if the season didn't
bring with it the happiness we wanted.
Christmas had become something to endure at least as much as it had become
something to enjoy--something to dread at least as much as something to
look forward to. Instead of an island of peace amid a busy life, it was an
island of bustle. The people we were talking to wanted so much more out of
Christmas: more music, more companionship, more contemplation, more time
outdoors, more love. And they realized that to get it, they needed less of
some other things: not so many gifts, not so many obligatory parties, not so
much hustle...
So the reason to change Christmas is not because it damages the earth around
us, though surely it does. (Visit a landfill the week after Christmas.) The
reason to change Christmas is not because it represents shameful excess in a
world of poverty, though perhaps it does. The reason to change Christmas--the reason it might be useful to change Christmas--is because it might help
us to get at some of the underlying discontent in our lives. Because it
might help us see how to change every other day of the year, in ways that
really would make our whole lives, and maybe our entire 365-days-a-year
culture, healthier in the long run.
For the moment, forget the effect of all this stuff on the environment,
though of course it's enormous. (According to the Worldwatch Institute,
North Americans have used more natural resources since the end of World War
II than all of humanity used in all the time before.) Forget all the
figures about debt and bankruptcy and our general failure to save for our
old age. Consider only the effect of this stuff on us. Up to a certain
point, it's delightful--we live in comfort, which is a new and still not
widespread phenomenon. <>
But past that point, and most of us are miles past
it, there's something oppressive about our gear, our equipment, our
trappings, our stuff. If nothing else, despite our ever-larger houses, we
have no place to put it. I wager that behind the fixed grin with which we
greet some grand Christmas present, many of us have thought: Where on earth
is this going to go? Here's the bottom line: We have so much stuff that a
pile of presents is no longer exciting, no longer novel. And we don't get so
excited by stuff--or, rather, we do, but not for long. We've been so
carefully trained to buy more that we find ourselves shopping when we're
bored or depressed, but the lift from the new thing hardly lasts the drive
home.
The Long Lost Silent Night
But that's not the real culprit. Much more, it's the way all the noises that
we choose to listen to have infiltrated our minds. We're caffeinated,
buzzed, wired, plugged-in. In one recent survey, only 19% of
Americans said they wanted a "more exciting, faster-paced life." Excitement
can't excite us anymore.
If there's one way in which the world has changed more than any other since 1840, one thing that's truly different about our lives, it's that we've become such devout consumers. That consumption carries with it certain blessings (our lives are long and easy by any historical standard) and certain costs (first and foremost the damage it causes to the rest of creation). But the greatest cost may be the way it has changed us, the way it has managed to confuse us about what we really want from the world. We weren't built just for this life we find ourselves leading--we were built for silence and solitude, built for connection with each other and the natural world, built for so much more than we now settle for. Christmas is the moment to sense that, the moment to reach for the real joys.