Christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind. To cherish peace and good will, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas. – Calvin Coolidge
When I was a wee lass, Christmas was pure magic. We always set up our tree on the day after Thanksgiving, and that was also when the cultural signs started; Christmas decorations went up in stores and on houses, television stations started airing Christmas specials, kids started thinking about our letters to Santa Claus, radio stations started adding Christmas songs into rotation and people started cashing in their Christmas clubs at banks. And in New Orleans, the Maison Blanche department store would set up its vast and fantastic Christmas display, a wondrous tableau of animated characters and music which stretched from the front windows all the way to Santa’s throne. Every year we made the drive into town to see Santa there, and the long wait in line did not matter at all because we were so absorbed in the display.
But as the years have gone by, Christmas has changed; the commercialism which Charlie Brown bemoaned in his Christmas special (which first aired the year before I was born) has now completely taken over the holiday, and most of the magic has been lost as a result. Though many of the signs of Christmas I loved (such as the Maison Blanche Christmas promotion) were certainly motivated by commercial concerns, they were not “the reason for the season” but rather helped to enhance it. But now it’s all about shopping; Christmas displays start going up on November 1st, and many have referred to Thanksgiving as a “forgotten holiday”, overshadowed even by what is vulgarly (and endlessly) referred to as “Black Friday”. You know, that day we used to call “the day after Thanksgiving”, which was once merely the official start of the Christmas season but is now touted as an observance in its own right. The endless urging to buy buy buy, the artificial sense of urgency, the stress caused by overspending on far too many gifts (we used to get one gift from Santa and one from our parents, plus a few small gifts in the stocking), the whining by Christians that it’s their holiday and they want it back, the hand-wringing by multiculturalists who agree with the Christians and therefore insist on draining every vestige of traditional symbolism out of the observance, and all the other modern enemies of the Christmas spirit conspire to reduce it to an “autumn shopping season” rather than a time to be happy and to show love to friends and family and goodwill to strangers.
In other words, like so many other things in the modern world, Christmas has expanded in quantity while dramatically decreasing in quality. The old Christmas was roughly 30 days of sweetness and magic, while the new “holiday buying season” is 60+ days of saccharine hype. The old celebration was nutritious to the soul, while the new one actually leaches spiritual vitality. And while the old one was organic and aromatic, the new one is wholly synthetic and entirely lacking in any bouquet other than fake pine scent to be sprayed on artificial Christmas trees.
