Bah Humbug
I really, really love Christmas. I like the shiny lights and the fun of dreaming up treats and presents for people I love. I like the music, the few days of winter holiday break, I like the food and I love seeing people.
But I really don’t like the kind of scary excess that occurs around Christmas – which is what I think of when I read this story from the BBC NEWS. How on earth can we need so much stuff? I also really hate it when shops and other money-making enterprises try to make Christmas begin before December has even arrived. I’m disgusted that Oxford Street has turned their lights on EVEN EARLIER this year. Does climate change mean nothing to these people? Obviously not. I have followed Dave Walker’s example and written an objection in their message column, and cancelled my annual shopping trip down there this Christmas. I just can’t support it. If you feel strongly about this, as I do, pop over to this link and add your tuppence worth. I have told them that I won’t be shopping there this year.
4 Responses to “Bah Humbug”
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author musician theologian
Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
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Thanks for this, Maggi. It’s an issue we are thinking of picking up on Ekklesia. A ‘viral marketing’ campaign could be very effective. I have written to the Head of Marketing at Oxford Street asking how they are responding to these criticisms, and whether they are willing to consider electricity free or sustainable alternatives.
Hmm.. I have to say part of me wanted that boat to sink. But then again think of all the folk in China it’s giving work to. Then again I wonder who gets the cash.
I think we should have a national Secret Santa approach to Christmas and buy someone you’ve never met a present. Just the one. It would bring everyone together and cost less.
Me? Dear Santa, bring me a shiny new wheeliebin.
Hmmmm! China!…..I keep wondering what people in China who have not travelled far imagine people who live in the West are like? All these plastic non essentials and clutter they are employed to make for us! Sadly it seems to sell! Unfortunately this seems to be emerging Christmas! What’s emerging church going to do about it?
Olive
There is all sorts of excess – but also crass misinterpretation. A couple of years ago I encountered the Leeds United chocolate advent calendar.
I’ve also been to the Christmas show given by a childrens group meeting in a church which did not metion Jesus at all.
Even my own children (aged 8 and 5), who will give as good an account as anyone of the real meaning of Christmas if they are asked, have been well educated in the presents and excess thing already. ‘No’ is hard work even for them.
Pester power becomes unthinking consumption unless we resist.
(Tony Walter wrote a book some years back ‘All You Love is Need’ Third Way SPCK 1985 in which, as I recall, he suggested that a great deal of Christian excess consumption was not the stuff we bought for ourselves, but the presents and gifts we bought each other).
But then Christmas is also about subversion – God is at work in the places invisible to the Herods of our day – so there is still hope.