Christmas

Just been to a church meeting about planning Christmas lunch for people who don’t have family to go to on Christmas Day or who find traditional family celebrations difficult, for whatever reason. Many will be old people, but on past experience others may be foreign students, single parents with children, single people of various ages, bereaved people who don’t want to be alone or in a family situation where they were a couple last year, and people from the drug and alcohol rehab.
I love Christmas. I love the anticipation, the suspension of normal activities, the preparation. I love the glitz, the decorations, candles, fantastic displays of lights indoors and out. I like the occasion for keeping in touch with people who would otherwise drift out of our lives. I love the excuse to get together with family, neighbours - people.
None of it seems inappropriate to me as a way of celebrating the birth of God’s son into our lives. We need razzmatazz to break up the drabness of routine life, and what better reason for celebrating?
But over the past few years I’ve become increasingly unwilling to spend October to December shopping for gifts. Buying a few presents for family and friends in the cheery festive atmosphere of the shopping centre at this special time of year, is a nice idea. It just doesn’t translate into reality when families are extensive and include ever-growing numbers of much-loved nieces and nephews, cousins’ children, friends’ children, and godchildren with siblings, as well as all the adults.
Then there are friends who send cards and friends who give presents, and people we didn’t know all that well last year but who have become friends over the course of this year, and friends we saw a lot last year but this year our lives have gone down different avenues and we’re no longer so close …. Card or present? The capacity for causing hurt or for making the other person feel pressured is alarming.
Then all those appeals from charities, all of them equally deserving.
And church bazaars and community fundraising events.
And evenings arranged for the sale of fairtrade or charity gifts – weird and expensive items that I can’t imagine anyone buying under any other circumstances than ‘in a good cause.’ And although it is a good cause, is it a good method? If the inequitable distribution of the world’s resources, resulting in poor communities having too little to eat, is due to rich people over-consuming things they don’t need, how can it be a solution to get poor communities to make more things that rich people don’t need or even want, and try to persuade them to buy them, out of guilt?
I like the Oxfam Unwrapped idea, taken up now by other charities like Tearfund and Christian Aid. Suggesting it tentatively to friends and relatives, I’ve found most respond with relief to the idea of someone buying a gift in their name for someone else in a far country suffering poverty. A goat or a bag of seed or a few chickens, a chance to make a livelihood – how much better than even a wanted gift, that the recipient could probably go out and buy for themselves.
There are a few exceptions. We know enough people here in this country finding it hard to make ends meet. Their Christmas present is money, given in advance, because the one thing they rarely get given is a choice.
And children without well-off parents or many relatives need presents to open on Christmas morning, and the presents need to be spot-on – nothing worse than giving something too young for their age or not right for their interests, when they don’t have much else. So we’ll probably give money in advance to the parents for their gifts, to choose what they know their children want or to let them choose for themselves.
And some people I will get presents for because they just need to be spoilt, because they’ve had a rough year or because they don’t really know that God loves them. And I’d hate them to think that God loves them so much that he gives someone else a goat.
It’s not about money. Sometimes it’s the wealthiest people who feel most unloved and insecure and need visible signs that they’re cared for, not envied or resented.
I try not to be too logical. Pray-before-you-buy seems the best way.
I’m bound to get it wrong, with some people. Christmas is like a microcosm of all the wide variety of relationships, including the one between the wealth and poverty, and it can seem such a minefield that it’s not surprising that many people try and avoid it - go abroad, get blind drunk, or shut the door on the world until it’s past or, saddest of all, commit suicide and opt out of not only Christmas but life.
But Christmas does still commemorate the start of life of a man, son of God himself, who still has power to change people’s lives and priorities and values and habits and to challenge all our securities and traditions and preconceived ideas of what life is about … and what Christmas is about.
I want to do it differently this year. It’s time for a rethink about all those things about Christmas that cause me discomfort, and I can’t give headroom to those uncomfortable thoughts while I’m obsessively searching the fifth shop to find exactly what someone has said they want as their present, for fear of their disappointment, or when I’m distracted by cute chocolate reindeer or a new flavour of tinsel.
Something has to give, this year….