Getting ready for Christmas
The singer Andy Williams would have you believe that it’s the most wonderful time of the year. Yeah, right. Try “stressful”, Andrew.
December is a rush, and Christmas is to blame: preparing for Christmas lunch or dinner, perhaps planning a holiday, writing cards, and scouting for appropriate and affordable gifts.
In the midst of all that, Christians ought to find some quiet time for prayerful reflection, in tune with the notion of two Christmases: the celebration of the feast of the Nativity and the cultural-commercial jamboree we may safely call X-Mas (historically, one might point out, there is nothing intrinsically irreverent about the term X-Mas, but we’ll leave that for another day). Taking spiritual time-out is not only a virtuous exercise, but also excellent therapy, at any time of the year. Psychological studies have proven that.
Conversely, shopping for the obligatory Christmas gifts is perhaps the most stressful seasonal activity, at least for those who try to invest a little thought into it.
In this issue, advertisers hope to catch the reader’s notice in a bid to encourage the purchase of Christian items as suitable Christmas gifts. Catholic shops are full of surprises. Apart from an abundant variety of books, one can find remarkable Christian paraphernalia.
Last year we decided that my dear mother-in-law, a Catholic of staunch tradition, should receive a new statue of Our Lady, to whom she has a great devotion. It fell upon me to make a selection, partly because I’m the more enthusiastic Christmas shopper, but mostly due to convenient proximity to a Catholic bookshop. I entered the bookshop with some anxiety. My mother-in-law has plenty of blue-shawled Our Ladys; there seemed little cause for adding to the assemblage. I needn’t have fretted: I walked out with a beautiful statue of a faceless Virgin, elegantly abstract and yet suggestive of holiness. The anxiety remained until Christmas Eve (our family follows the German Christmas tradition): I liked the statue, but would mother-in-law like it? Oh, but she did.
The upshot of this rather boring story is that a well-stocked Catholic shop or repository may very well produce an unexpected and meaningful gift. It certainly beats that old stand-by for the desperate, the gift voucher.
And a religious gift need not be reserved only for the most devout among Catholics. A thoughtfully chosen gift can serve even the more casual Catholic. The trick here, I suppose, is to avoid the perception of such gifts hinting unsubtly that the recipients better jack up their faith. So the gift of a rosary — and which good Catholic doesn’t need a few of those? — could be complemented by a DVD of a favourite movie, or, depending on the recipient’s disposition, a bottle of good whisky.
Buying religious gifts for teenagers and children is a much more hazardous enterprise. Religion is not widely regarded as cool. The last thing a kid wants is to meet their friends for the X-Mas post-mortem and having to list a bagful of presents which their peers might think of as lame.
Here again the two-gift rule is useful (replacing the whisky, of course). Another trick when considering a religiously-themed gift for a youngster from age eight up is to buy something aimed at children a year or two older. This works for two reasons: firstly, children grow up quicker than they used to; secondly, kids like to feel older than they actually are (though that will change before they know it).
There are some gifts that are just tacky. In the United States, Action Jesus toys are, apparently, selling very well. I fear that in a modern child’s hands, Action Jesus invariably would enter into combat with assorted caped crusaders, ninja turtles and karate-chopping soldier figures (though Action Jesus’ might beat them all thanks to his “glow-in-the-dark miracle hands”). Which defeats the point somewhat. Far better that Action Jesus hang tough with Action Moses, Action Shakespeare, Action Einstein, Action Obama and Action Jane Austen (I’m not making this up). Perhaps Action Jesus is really the perfect gift for the collector of esoteric novelty.
Of course Christmas, even its secular version, should not be all about gifts. Perhaps it is the gift shopping in packed malls that diminishes the loveliness of the season; a loveliness we then restlessly try to conjure by attending a carol service.
The Christmas spirit can be found in traditions, especially family traditions. Our family has many of those. And it’s never too late to begin new ones. So this year my son, nephews and I will continue a tradition we started only last year: building a Lebkuchenhaus — known in English, slightly inaccurately, as a gingerbread house. The challenge this year will be to improve on last year’s emphatically experimental architecture.
But more than that, it is a wonderful opportunity for the guys to commandeer the kitchen in a bout of (messy) creativeness, an opportunity which has been eagerly awaited since we destroyed and ate last year’s delicious structure in the first hours of Christmas morning.
And that, to me, is the true spirit of the secular Christmas, the X-Mas of buying presents for others and receiving gifts from them, of cooking for others and have others cook for us, of sharing traditions and getting together to construct a Lebkuchenhaus, dress the Christmas tree or sing carols. It is the sense of a special union between people — within the family, among friends and colleagues, among the wider community. It’s that famous good will everybody’s talking about.
Which begs the question: why can’t it be Christmas every day?
- Archbishop Tlhagale: The ‘Gangster’ - February 7, 2025
- Bishop Edward Risi: The Liturgist - February 5, 2025
- Archbishop Nubuasah: Apostle of the Batswana - February 3, 2025