Onward Christmas Soldiers

(The following was originally written for the 2009 Christmas season, but just as applicable today.)


    I haven't seen any statistics, but it seems as though Christmas goes up for sale earlier and earlier every year.
    When I was a kid my grandmother cleaned up from Thanksgiving that night and the tree went up the very next day. She absolutely could not wait for Christmas, but somehow it never occurred to her to interfere with Thanksgiving by piling Christmas on top of it. Nowadays they have Christmas out well before even the Un-Holiday (Halloween).
    Aside from the increasingly disproportionate weight that holidays take on as Americans are driven to add deeper meaning to their lives while drifting farther and farther from God, this grotesque overgrowth of the celebration of the Christ-child crawls out of our deep commitment to the Dollar – that golden image before which all peoples, nations, and languages must bow.
    Every year the news covers the Christmastide economic forecast like nervous meteorologists watching a Category 5 hurricane spinning in the Atlantic. American retailers pin all their hopes and fears for the year on Christmas sales. If the people don't spend themselves into a stupor at Christmas, retailers will close the doors, the axe is laid to the root of the American economy, and the Great and Powerful Walmart will be left shaking behind a curtain in the corner. The nightly message is clear: we must spend enough money to threaten the financial stability of our families, or the financial stability of the nation is in jeopardy.
    What on earth is going on here?
    It can be easy to mistake busy-ness for purpose, especially in the holiday crush with everyone else pressing into that busy-ness, and retail advertisers singing one more chorus of Onward Christmas Soldiers. But all that activity has nothing to do with the actual purpose of the holiday, which is Christ. Not a safe and cozy, sleeping, baby-in-a-manger snugglebox that everyone can feel comfortable, warm, and fuzzy about; but the infinitely blindingly brilliant Prince of Life whose eyes flame with fire, and whose very act of stepping down from the glories and power of heaven to enter this world as the poorest and most helpless of creatures places an urgent, immediate, and unyeilding claim upon our very lives.
    That is what we are shouting down with all our rampant gift giving. I mean, even in "hard" times cash is relatively abundant for us, and easier to throw around than sincere meaning, or real personal investment.
    It might be that our economy would be blessed more if we focused more on putting first things first. But it is absolute folly to suppose that we can somehow spend ourselves into prosperity, at Christmas or at any other time. Real prosperity is built on long term principles of financial stability. If the foundation of the building is compromised, then frantic building activity all over the house isn't going to solve anything. Construction will have to stop, and the foundation will have to be fixed no matter how much time and expense that might entail. If the families of America are financially shaky, then America is financial shaky, and all the bailout spending in Washington isn't going to change that.
    And if our spiritual foundation is compromised (as it surely is), then everything is compromised – economy and all – because that's where it all begins. That's where the principles leading to financial prosperity come from, and a hundred other aspects that are much, much more important than even the Dollar.

Dec 2010 Addendum
This year we saw what seems to be some sort of a record; the local Walmart actually had the Christmas trees back down and off display before December! No kidding. They had two big beautiful trees at the doors, and the big display of all the trees in the garden center. Our four-year-old literally waited all year long to see those trees, ever since last Christmas. All year he kept asking and waiting for the Christmas trees. This certainly beats all. Not even three weeks they had them all up, but they had to get those pesky things out of the way so they could put out racks and racks of important Christmas merchandise like 'Justin Bieber' paraphernalia. We just could not believe it.