Human Rites

Christmas is possibly the most pervasive public festival in the world (or at least it’s a close run race between Christmas, the Chinese New Year, Eid al-Adhar and Diwali). Like any public celebration, it has come to represent the values that the people that celebrate it hold dearly.

Consider a typical celebration of Christmas. A family gathers around a tree, decorated with tinsel and lights. Under the tree are wrapped gifts, which many of the younger children believe are delivered by a magical man in a red and white suit. One by one, the presents are opened by their new owners. This ceremony is normally followed by a large meal.

Whatever its historical origins, Christmas must be understood as a rite of our popular religion: consumerism. Young children are inducted into the mystery of contemporary capitalism, where desirable goods appear with few clues as to their provenance, and where overconsumption is celebrated through good food and drink. Once a year, we gather together to teach our children and remind ourselves, that happiness can be found in material possessions acquired with minimal effort.

So important is Christmas to our consumerist calendar that many families max out their credit cards and struggle through January to ensure that gifts and good food are available for this one day.

Yet strangely, many of the people who celebrate Christmas in this way would denounce the understanding of human happiness that their actions communicate. Along with traditions of consumption, Christmas carries a rhetoric of selflessness, of giving not receiving, and of resting from work and shopping.

What if our society subverted our Christmas realities, drawing on our better understandings of the season? What if we abandoned crowded malls for time spent well with people and swapped Boxing Day sales for a grateful celebration of what we have? It would certainly mean fewer gifts under most Christmas trees, but perhaps more value put on what is given – fewer shopping trips, but more time creating relationships worth celebrating.

For all our individuality, we are not very good at breaking the mould that we’ve made for ourselves with the festival of Christmas, and there is a great need for us to think hard about what and how we celebrate our public rites.

This entry was posted on 04/12/2009 at 01:24 pm and is filed under Insight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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