I'm remembering that in the early years of my life, our larger family used to draw names for Christmas. I, and all my brothers and sister were born during the 1940s, during World War II or shortly after. Drawing names was a strategy for sharing gifts across a large extended family while trying not to break anybody's budget during lean times. As our aunts and uncles gave us new cousins from time to time, and as we gained more brothers and finally a sister at home, it was much too much to try to buy Christmas presents for everyone. So we would draw names. The idea was that we would never know who drew our name until Christmas arrived and we got our extended family Christmas present. We didn't get a lot of presents, but we were never left out, and we each gave our person a present.
We often hear what a hectic, nerve-wracking, and exhausting time Christmas is for some of us, as we try to get everything put together for that perfect family Christmas. The TV is chock full of ads, trying to persuade us that this or that is just the perfect gift for so-and-so and if you shop with us everybody will just be thrilled and full of Christmas joy. Even the newspapers weigh three times as much as their ordinary pages do, because of the extra circulars showing us all the goodies that will make this year's Christmas special. These days we are hearing about exciting shopping traditions called Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The idea seems to be that everybody will want to get out to their favorite stores on the day after Thanksgiving to get in on all those new and exciting deals of the season, and to have the thrill of being out among the crowds of excited fellow spenders. Or, if that isn't your thing, but you still want to get in on all the best deals, you can flash your credit card number out across cyberspace and rake in gifts shipped from just about anywhere in the world.
It seems that according to some of the ads, the object of your shopping is not what we needed to buy or what we plan to do with it, but how much we saved by buying. I see an ad showing this lady who got up really early for Black Friday, and wore herself totally out with her shopping; but she saved hundreds, she says. But her friend, who showed up to remark on how tired she looks, then says, I slept in, and still saved thousands (see the new car in the background). So the lady who slept-in wins the shopping contest, and the lady who got up early wore herself out for nothing. I guess I don't understand the logic of these ads, and I don't have any idea how to beat my friends at getting all the best deals.
What if Christmas really isn't about all those things? What if it doesn't really matter about getting the best deals, or getting the just right present for somebody? What if all our fretting about how to have a perfect family Christmas is much ado about the wrong things? How is it that a festival celebrating the birth of Jesus turns into a time of worrying about getting just the right things for people who have everything, and a time for getting more stuff for kids who already have rooms full of stuff?
One of the Christmas traditions I grew up with in church was an offering every December for our children's home. We don't use the word orphan much these days, and now we have smaller group homes instead of having the large institutional orphanages to take care of children who lost their parents. But it always seemed very fitting at Christmas time to do things to help unfortunate kids. That's what the original St. Nick was about.
In the Bible, the Lord makes the point that it is more blessed to give than to receive. I take it that the blessing of giving is not just that someday generosity and kindness will bring a reward, but that the experience of giving is itself an experience of blessing as one gives. In fact, it says that the experience of blessing as a person shares in caring ways is greater than to receive good things for oneself.
Jesus was himself a giver, not a taker. He was more dedicated to sharing and caring and less about receiving things for his own comfort or enjoyment. So it seems a pity if we make the celebration of His coming into the world a time to be focusing on what we want for Christmas. It seems much better to try to make Christmas more of a caring, sharing, giving time, and less a time for gaining advantages and pleasant things for ourselves.
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 12/17/2014