Frank's Cottage

It was a media release from a Toronto radio station, issued more than a month before Christmas, that did it.

At the time, I was an assistant editor at a newspaper in the Toronto area when this came across my desk: “97.3 EZ Rock is thrilled today to announce they will be playing 100 percent holiday music up to and including Dec. 25,” it said.

Grrr….

I felt my back go up and my eyes roll in disgust.
“Well, that’s one radio station I won’t be listening to until January,” I immediately vowed.

At this point, I guess it’s no surprise to write that Christmas and I haven’t always been best friends. In fact, when that media release came out, Christmas and I were like North and South Korea. I wouldn’t even call it the Christmas season; I labelled it the shopping season.

Then as now, the mass consumption fun quietly kicks off the minute you close the door on your final trick-or-treater. If you have a Santa Clause parade where you live, that’s when the ribbon is officially cut.

By that time, the stores are decking the halls with balls of holly, Christmas commercials are flooding your TV, and obnoxious radio stations are assaulting your ears with insipid music.

In other words, the squeeze is on. Start buying. Start listening. Start watching. Start organizing your social schedule. And start feeling what our culture says you’re supposed to feel.

Shopping season continues to Dec. 25, which is the shopping holiday where we can all relax and look at everything we bought. Just a day later, shopping season resumes for a final, intense week of frantic consumption, followed by a thank-you card in the mail from the Retail Council of Canada.

I’m a church-going man, but in this world, Christmas has so little to do with its real meaning (the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, who many people believe is the Son of God), I’ve sometimes found myself resenting the entire thing.

“I can empathize with your feeling,” says Allan Baker, pastor at a church in Ontario. “It’s similar to how I feel — ‘oh my goodness, here we go again’.”

Rev. Baker says ambivalence towards Christmas is not a rare condition.

“Maybe it’s because I’m older that I encounter more and more people disenchanted with the micro-thin depth of Christmas. That’s part of the reason me and my (pastoral) colleagues find more people in church this time of year.”

Rev. Baker notes he’s a citizen of this world and of the world of Jesus. “It’s a tension in one’s life — there’s all this pressure of the commercial world, but I need to remember there is a real God I’m devoted to. So I can go shopping and know there is a god higher than the marketplace.”

Even in December, many churches consider themselves not to be in the Christmas season at all. They’re in Advent, “the period of preparation for the celebration of the nativity [birth] of Jesus”, according to Wikipedia.

In other words, it’s a time of waiting, generally stretching four Sundays.

“We try very hard to stay in the Advent season,” says Dawn Hutchings, pastor at a church in Ontario. “It’s really about emptying oneself and realizing our need for God. We don’t sing Christmas carols in church until Dec. 24.”

Rev. Baker calls Advent a time of discipline. Could that be any more radical in a culture that, at this time of year, stresses the exact opposite in everything from gift-giving to office parties to your entire social schedule?

“When we tell a 2,000-year-old story of Jesus’s birth and ministry, it’s sometimes a challenge for people to find it relevant,” admits Rob MacIntosh, another church pastor. “But it is. If we would live that part of Christianity — bringing (the Christmas message of) peace and relationship into our homes, then we could spread it to people around us. If we can get the love part working right, then we’ll have the authority to speak to people about our faith.”

And doing that, in a way that emphasizes God’s equal love for every single human being on this planet, could bring us to a place of seeing Christmas as a life-changing light in the darkest season of the year.

What’s your story when it comes to Christmas? Do you struggle with the season? Or have you found what Jesus followers might call a “peace that passes understanding”?