Have Yourself a Materialistic Christmas

Christmas has gotten too spiritual and is just not materialistic enough. I know that sounds backwards, but I’m not kidding. The first Christmas was much more materialistic. For the first Christmas, the night of Jesus birth, was all about God becoming part of the stuff of our world. The same God who made all creation and declared it very good showed how good the stuff of this world can be by being born as one of us and living among us.

The plain old stuff of this world was redeemed, made new, by the very presence of our creator in our midst. The ordinary strips of cloth used to wrap any infant now wrapped God incarnate. An ordinary feed box became his crib. God intended to show the essential goodness of all creation. God did not cheat, becoming human in a palace full of the finer things nor did Jesus wait to be born in the sanitary whiteness of a modern obstetrics ward.

The stuff of this world matters to God who lovingly created all there is. But we have so spiritualized the baby in the manger, so remade him into an image of perfection that we can’t imagine Mary ever having to change a diaper. When we overly spiritualize Jesus’ birth, we avoid the shock of what it meant for God to become human. We end up with a greeting-card faith that can’t stand up to the challenges of real life.

We need a more materialistic view of Christmas. Grab hold of the reality of what it meant for God to be made man. Mary and Joseph got no divine assurance that night. Only a grubby group of shepherds with oddly glowing faces as they told of a multitude of angels seen somewhere in the night.

The three wise men were still off in the distance somewhere. There were no gifts great or small that first night. There was only the common stuff of this world. That’s the materialism of Christmas—plain old ordinary stuff made holy by God’s presence.

A more materialistic Christmas does not look like a mad, frantic dash to get just the right stuff to give someone. It’s a fallen, flawed view of matter to amass more stuff as if it is the stuff you own that matters. It’s the stuff you are made of that matters.

Having a more materialistic Christmas means not over spiritualizing what happened that night in Bethlehem. Stop looking at the halos long enough to realize that Mary and Joseph were common people like us.

Don’t give in to the temptation to spiritualize the Nativity. Remember the stick of the animals, the grime on the edge of the feed box into which his parents lovingly placed Jesus. Remember how tired and frustrated Jesus’ parents must have felt to find themselves in this predicament. By all outward signs, that poor couple was about as far from God’s will as someone could get. Acknowledging all that means that God can and will come to you as you are.

In the 1600s, there was a move to completely spiritualize Christmas. Oliver Cromwell led the government of England in outlawing Christmas, and “other superstitious festivals.” Christmas had gotten to crassly commercial for Cromwell’s Puritan tendencies and so he became the original Grinch who stole Christmas.

The stuff of Christmas—Christmas decorations—were strictly outlawed. Troops prevented public celebrations of Jesus’ birth. The government said that the people did not need the stuff of Christmas. They called it “Christ-tide” and suggested people stay home and fast, having only a spiritual Christmas. There were riots in the streets, but Cromwell’s men stood firm, abolishing Christmas in the 1640s in England. In time Cromwell and his Long Parliament were overthrown and Christmas made a comeback in England.

The stuff we now know as Christmas is an American original, a mix of other cultures. The Irish put lights in their windows. The German brought evergreen trees into their houses. Many Europeans took the day off from work and had a holiday. In America, they joined together to do all that and more. The stuff of Christmas aiding a spiritual celebration.

Yes, the stuff of Christmas has gotten carried away, way away. But that is what happens when Jesus’ birth becomes a spiritual matter and we leave the materialistic stuff to the rest of the culture. Instead, we need our Christmas celebrations to affect the matter we use to celebrate. Choose to emphasize the stuff of Bethlehem—the manger, Mary and the baby Jesus, and the star—instead of the stuff of the North Pole in your Christmas decorations.

Mary and Joseph did not need more and better things to be a part of God’s plan for human history. Mary and Joseph just needed to make room in their lives for God to break into the here and now through the regular stuff of life. That’s all we need this Christmas as well.

God broke all the rules that night in Bethlehem to fulfill a love story centuries in the making. God became human in the lowliest of circumstances. The idea of God becoming human among nobodies on the backside of a little town is wondrous, for it means that God knows you and loves you even as you are.

God wants to encounter you in the common stuff of life. You don’t need more or better things to be happy. You need God to come into your regular, everyday circumstances. And God can and will do just that. For you are part of the plain old matter of this world which God sent his son to redeem. Yourself, your soul, your body are part of what God looked at and called very good, and that is Good News of great joy for all the people.

(The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)

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