Merry Countercultural Christmas!

I enjoyed Christmas in its modern American form for the first twelve years of my life. Then, one year, at the age of 13, I had three Christmases to take part in. Having just been reunited with my mother’s side of my family after not knowing them for all those years, the newness of fitting into their Christmas in addition to that of my life at home, and again at my grandparents’ place, I was in Christmas heaven for a kid. Or so it would seem to someone reading the surface. That Christmas season of 1986 was the time when the special day, and the season that wrapped around it, broke. I was made to participate in all the tree selection, trimming, going to church, shopping, wrapping, and all that, but this time in multiple households, one of which was 100 miles away. That was the first crack in the wall for me, the first time the commercial Christmas overwhelmed me.

I remember trying to sit out the tree trimming at my mom’s. By that time I had already done my tree at home and one at my grandparents’ place. I remember one of those was an ordeal, so this third time around was just not fun, and the not-so-subtle coercion to return to the fold was unnerving at the same time as a messy wave of feelings started in on me.

My mother was a single mother with two other kids, both younger than me, and my older sister with her two kids—all living in the same place. The two bedroom apartment was a crowded place, loud and boistrous, particularly with seven of us when I was there. Mother worked her full time position and another weekend/overnight position too. She was never of great means. She financed Christmas with the help of plastic, and who knows how long it took to pay her way out of that hole, given the family she tried to lavish with gifts in order to create some sense of normalcy. That year, since it was the first Christmas she and I had shared, she seemed to put on a big show of gift-giving prowess. That year wasn’t a time of austerity, as far as gifts were concerned. After all, it was the peak of the era of Reaganomics!

In the years since, I’ve had Christmas take interesting twists and turns through a few more years of trees and slowly diminishing piles of gifts beneath them. Some have been miserable affairs both in the presence of family, and some for lack of that relationship. Most involved at least my cursory visit to church during the years I now call my athiest period. For years I was an orphan during the holidays and so spent a lot of years coattailing on the gatherings of friends and coworkers. Finally that too collapsed. It took the better part of a decade and a half before I found a new understanding of what Christmas means. It was both shocking and liberating to arrive at this knowledge close to my 30th birthday. By that time I found myself ready to relinquish the commercial Christmas and its presents in favor of what I enjoy calling true Christmas Presence.

It is like an onion, figuring out what Christmas means. Each year, the chance to peel back one more layer is before me. Each year, the chance to slowly reorient friends and family to not buy presents bears some fruit. Little by little, folks are getting the message that I wish to not be showered with commercial gifts. I have enjoyed some of the personalized things that people have given me that show they understand this request. But by far, the things that stand out more and more are the moments of connection and fellowship and interaction that turn up as a product of some initiative and a lot of grace.

In December 2008, only at the very beginning of what we now call the Great Recession, Lee Van Ham did an Advent-themed forum over a few nights at my church, which this year is presented to you as a five part blog entry called Unwrapping Christmas in a New Paradigm. That series of forums, even after I had known Lee for a few years at that point, blew the roof off my old ideas of what Christmas was about. I wish you could see him deliver this in person. That forum series came in the midst of a year or two when all I did was read about Jesus. I had come close to this information, but never had it leapt alive like those nights when Lee animated it for those of us in the room. I asked him to revisit that material—and let’s be straight here, two years’ delay is nothing when pondering the cosmological significance of the birth narratives—because I know more people need to know this than those who were at church those nights. So, keep your eyes on this journal through November and December for some delightfully counter-cultural stuff. Maybe this is old hat to you who deal in spiritual matters or theology, but for those of you emerging out of the commercial Christmas trance, this is good stuff that might rock your world, and give you fortitude to move on to better things. I like to think maybe now that a couple years of recession have dealt harshly with a lot of people and our culture in general, we’ve had time to ask the questions of economics, of our place in things, and maybe to have new ears to hear the kind of message that Lee has brought us in this series—a message of reorienting our priorities away from the one dimensional economics that Marketus Augustus has to offer, and over to the three dimensional economics that God wants us to enjoy.