{"id":178,"date":"2008-12-16T09:25:27","date_gmt":"2008-12-16T09:25:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/humbug-old-fogey-sj.html"},"modified":"2008-12-16T09:25:27","modified_gmt":"2008-12-16T09:25:27","slug":"humbug-old-fogey-sj","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/humbug-old-fogey-sj.html","title":{"rendered":"Humbug: Old Fogey, SJ"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Botticelli<\/span>I had just finished ordering our annual sheaf of seasonally tacky and nicely inexpensive Christmas cards–my three-year-old on a carousel in various stages of glee, below her a wish for joy to the world and peace in 2009 and all that stuff–when I received a link to Father Jim Martin’s annual Scrooge-fest on NPR. Titled “More Virgin Mary, Less Virgin Islands”<\/a> (it came out on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception), Jim grumbles (well, in his very congenial way) about Christmas cards from even pious friends that have no Christmas scene but rather “a photo of a family on some beach in the Caribbean. Or a picture of somebody’s house. Or someone’s dog wearing reindeer horns.” He continues:<\/p>\n

Look, I love family photos during the holidays. Plus, I actually read those annual holiday letters, all of which start with “What a busy year it’s been!” Seeing photos of my friends and their families and even enjoying a few sunny beach scenes when it’s cold and dark outside is a highlight of December.
\nBut I enjoy the photos more when they’re inside the card, not the card itself. Because more and more, even devout Christians have been replacing Jesus, Mary and Joseph with themselves. Doesn’t it strike you as weird to set aside the Holy Family in favor of your family? Does a photo of Cabo San Lucas trump the story told by the original San Lucas? Is Christmas really about you?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I guess we all have our pet peeves. I tend (well, it’s more like an iron-clad reaction) to roll my eyes at those family newsletters that recount how wonderful the past year has been for them, and all the great places they went and things they bought. Our family used to sit around the dinner table coming up with our sad-sack tales (all too true) that we’d write up and send out the next Christmas. We never did, but it was fun to contemplate. And I must say, receiving the occassional card from justifiably proud new parents but with the phrase, “For unto us a child is born…” on the top makes me wince more than a bit.
\nStill, I think the good Jesuit is being a bit Jansenist. (And he is younger than I am. Barely.) Christmas has always been as much about family and secular festivities as it has been a strictly solemn, religious feast. I’ll admit that it wasn’t until I lived in Rome that I finally realized, during a holiday largely shorn of Santa-mania, that I came to truly appreciate Easter and place it in a proper context with Christmas. And as a single fellow with access to the Vatican Tipografia<\/em> I could get their really awesome Christmas cards–high-quality, with boffo art from the in-house collection, and cheap.
\nBut now life is different, and I like sending out a holiday card with my kid on it. In fact, I just sent one to Jim Martin, just to spite him. But I did use one of those lovely Botticelli Madonna and Child stamps<\/a> (with John the Baptist this year).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had just finished ordering our annual sheaf of seasonally tacky and nicely inexpensive Christmas cards–my three-year-old on a carousel in various stages of glee, below her a wish for joy to the world and peace in 2009 and all that stuff–when I received a link to Father Jim Martin’s annual Scrooge-fest on NPR. Titled…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nHumbug: Old Fogey, SJ - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/humbug-old-fogey-sj.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Humbug: Old Fogey, SJ - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I had just finished ordering our annual sheaf of seasonally tacky and nicely inexpensive Christmas cards–my three-year-old on a carousel in various stages of glee, below her a wish for joy to the world and peace in 2009 and all that stuff–when I received a link to Father Jim Martin’s annual Scrooge-fest on NPR. 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Titled…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/humbug-old-fogey-sj.html","og_site_name":"Pontifications","article_published_time":"2008-12-16T09:25:27+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/files\/import\/imgs\/Botticelli%20stamp.jpg"}],"author":"David Gibson","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/humbug-old-fogey-sj.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/humbug-old-fogey-sj.html","name":"Humbug: Old Fogey, SJ - Pontifications","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/humbug-old-fogey-sj.html#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/humbug-old-fogey-sj.html#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/files\/import\/imgs\/Botticelli%20stamp.jpg","datePublished":"2008-12-16T09:25:27+00:00","dateModified":"2008-12-16T09:25:27+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#\/schema\/person\/122b0877ab87552bb8f14c366dd43e71"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/humbug-old-fogey-sj.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/humbug-old-fogey-sj.html"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/humbug-old-fogey-sj.html#primaryimage","url":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/files\/import\/imgs\/Botticelli%20stamp.jpg","contentUrl":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/files\/import\/imgs\/Botticelli%20stamp.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/humbug-old-fogey-sj.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Humbug: Old Fogey, SJ"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/","name":"Pontifications","description":"Catholic Faith and Culture","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#\/schema\/person\/122b0877ab87552bb8f14c366dd43e71","name":"David Gibson","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/19b\/19bb39c535cd2d776c73c7941f42622cx96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/19b\/19bb39c535cd2d776c73c7941f42622cx96.jpg","caption":"David Gibson"},"description":"DAVID GIBSON is an award-winning religion journalist, author, filmmaker, and a convert to Catholicism. He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}