Is Your Christmas Ruined This Year?

By now, you’ve heard the news reports lamenting that Christmas will be ruined this year due to product shortages caused by backups at the West Coast ports.

But can Christmas be stopped because you cannot get all the stuff you want?

Christmas joy should not be confined within those shipping containers sitting on

the docks.

But our culture emphasizes stuff. Everyone is trying to get more stuff. Even though most of us have way more stuff than we need, we crave more. And many people view Christmas as a way to get much more stuff.

Christmas is by far the most religious holiday. Those in the more spiritual realms worship the birth of THE MAN. If your god happens to be money-stuff, you celebrate by buying, giving, and receiving as much stuff as you can.

We are motivated, manipulated, and cheered on in these festivities by the television commercials that tell us this is the season to hoard everything and anything we can. It is troubling that none of these advertisers actually mention the “reason for the season”, carefully using every euphemism in the book to avoid saying …. Christmas. They can’t actually say His name because that would be messy. They don’t want to expose the fact that a so-called holy day is being exploited for profit. One clever retailer has invented the term “Joy. Fully.”, attempting to fuse the spiritual with the physical. Or maybe it just means you should get your joy from a full shopping cart.

So we have combined the original pagan roots of the solstice/Saturlina festival with the commemoration of THE MAN’s birth. And being the highly inclusive people that we are, you have the freedom to celebrate as you prefer.

Now there are plenty of ways to find merriment at Christmastime. And we all celebrate in our personal ways. The three main ways are:

1.    The spiritual aspect, which includes charity that results from faith.

2.    Family and traditions.

3.    The giving and getting of stuff.

To maximize your Christmas joy, you need a balance of all three of these. (Forgive me for thinking like an economist). Overemphasizing any of these reduces the total happiness. If it’s all just the “Mass” part, you miss out on the fun of the traditions and the stuff. This is equivalent to being invited to THE MAN’s birthday party but not being allowed to have any fun. If you get too hooked on just the traditions, (People with thousand-dollar light displays and overzealous cookie-bakers, yeah, you!) you also lose out on some joy. Perhaps, diverting some of the resources to charity could help.

Which brings us back to the “stuff”. The harmful result of being committed, addicted, attracted to the stuff, is that you will value the stuff over people. We have seen the videos of people fighting over products on Black Friday (the holy day for stuff lovers). People have been punched in the face in pursuit of the hottest gifts.

The current conditions where stuff, including money – the means to buy the stuff, is more important than people, is the greatest failing, the most harmful aspect, of our culture. Yes, here greed is good, and that message is pounded into us every day, and unfortunately, more in December than any other time.

If your god is money and the stuff it provides, you will use this season as an opportunity to spend as much money as you possibly can - to explode your money across the universe. That behavior is the natural result of the love of money and stuff, because everyone worships some God, or gods – just be extremely careful which one/ones you choose.

Which brings us back to Christmas.  If there is one universal message of Christmas, and this is true whether you consider it truth or fable, it is that people are much more important than stuff. And nothing is more important than people. As we read about THE MAN, we see He always put the needs of people first. He NEVER, EVER valued stuff more than people. Not once – not one time.

This truth should influence not just how we approach things at Christmas, especially our charity efforts, but all year round. It should impact how we interact with strangers, our relationships, even our political views. And if people are the most important thing, who should we admire more – the CEO of the large corporation or the guy who runs the soup kitchen downtown?

If bare shelves and stockouts can ruin your Christmas, maybe you are doing it wrong.