The Divine Commodity by Jethani Skye

Author:Jethani, Skye [Jethani, Skye]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2009-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6: THE LAND OF DESIRE

Through faith we may become “sorrowful yet always

rejoicing” and ever green, and we need not complain

when our youth flies with the maturing of our strength.

Vincent van Gogh

SELLING SANTA

Shortly before Christmas I was walking through Woodfield Mall, the largest in Illinois. I was disappointed to see that Santa’s Grotto, where children waited in line for a brief one-on-one consultation with Mr. Claus, had been transformed into an enormous promotional display for the upcoming penguin movie, Happy Feet . Apparently the mall’s managers were not bothered that Santa was difficult to see among the huge images of computer-generated penguins, and clearly nobody was disturbed by the geographic discrepancy — penguins only live at the South Pole and Santa resides at the North Pole. Sadder to me was the absence of the grand Christmas tree that had stood at the center of the mall since my childhood. It appeared that Santa had sold his season, and his soul, to Warner Brothers Studios. I was comforted by the irony of the scene — the character that had commercialized Christmas a century ago had fallen victim to his own devices.

Christians have always had a strained relationship with Saint Nick. Although his origins are rooted deeply in church lore, his association with the secularization of Christmas has made him persona non grata in many churches. But many of us forget that Christmas itself is a holiday of dubious origin. For example, the Puritans were stridently opposed to the celebration of Christmas. They could find no biblical support for the holiday, and they believed (correctly) that it was originally a pagan festival now masquerading as a Christian one. This view was widely held in America throughout the nineteenth century. In 1855, newspapers in New York reported that Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches would be closed on Christmas Day because “they do not accept the day as a Holy One.” And by the 1860s only eighteen states officially recognized the holiday.

Christmas only gained acceptance among a majority of Protestant Christians when it gained wide acceptance by the American public in general. And that can be attributed to the rise of Santa Claus in the secular pantheon. By the 1920s, Old Saint Nick became a marketing juggernaut for retailers who had embraced Christmas as the premier season for shopping. Church leaders no longer objected to Christmas on the grounds that it was a pagan holiday. Instead their concerns shifted to the ungodly materialism and indulgence of desire they saw being promoted in the name of Christ.

The New York Times conducted a survey of Christmas sermons in 1931 and reported a common theme: “the suggestion that Christmas could not survive if Christ were thrust into the background by materialism.” Another popular sermon of the period railed that Advent had become little more than a “profit-seeking period.”

Sermons about the pagan origins of Christmas or the danger of rampant materialism in Christ’s name are unlikely to be heard today. In recent years the dominant message heard from the Christian community during the holiday season has been precisely the opposite.

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