The Hundred Dollar Holiday

Just in time for the War on Christmas, a series of reports from Marketplace: Consumed.

I've heard a few of these; I highly recommend them. Bill McKibben, a few years ago, published a little book titled Hundred Dollar Holiday, which I would highly recommend. It isn't like this theme is new, exactly. Francis Moore Lappe published Diet for a Small Planet over three decades ago. I remember a friend of mine, even earlier, campaigning in college to get McDonald's to reduce their packaging (they did; slightly). None of this is new, but we still act as if nothing has happened, or will ever happen, except that life as we know it will extend out in to the future forever, and eventually envelop the whole world. At least the parts that aren't crazy and hate us for our freedom.

So, in preparation for the shopping season which has already started (the Xmas carols were playing in every store in my area the day Hallowe'en was over), listen to the Marketplace reports; or get a copy of McKibben's book. Or, if you're so inclined, think about what preparing for the coming of the Christchild should mean to the world in physical, not just metaphysical, terms.

It couldn't hurt.

Is Christmas Over Yet?

Because I'm not doing anything that promotes her new book

I ask because the local strip mall had it's Xmas decorations out in mid-October.  No, that isn't a typo; I typed what I meant and meant what I typed:  mid-October.

Hallowe'en wasn't over before they were up at all the other retail parking lots around me.  Christmas music has already started, too. 

Some years ago I recall hearing about a German store clerk who sued for violation of his human rights because the store he worked in started playing Christmas music in mid-December.  More and more, he has my sympathies, and my wish that such a suit would be recognized in an American court.

Fat chance.

I have no desire to go to war on Christmas, but every year I get closer to thinking about enlisting, if only because the retail observances of it are so insufferable.  Perhaps it is best for me to simply restate my support for Bill McKibben's Hundred Dollar Holiday and recommend it to all of you for your yuletide reading and pleasure.  We could do worse than recover the Christmas Charles Dickens resurrected with Pickwick and Ebenezer Scrooge.  No tree, no presents, and lots of games and food and family or friends.  Let Thanksgiving be for family, if you must close in.  Let Christmas be for everyone you know who you can gather.

I know; too radical.  We are all beholden to Clement Clark Moore.  Maybe it's time, however, to start loosening those mind-forged manacles, and regain the holiday we have all but lost.

Before Sarah Palin sells it right out from under us.....

Truce On Xmas

War on Christmas update: we're now demanding Santa's unconditional surrender pic.twitter.com/lnGKbTkhe5

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 13, 2021

I have mentioned before, more than once, that I make things for people for Xmas.  I've been making and sending out fruitcakes (rum soaked and tasty, not the kind apparently assembled by a pile driver where fruits are pressed together so tightly they’re held by an atomic bond) for over 30 years (!).  I used to make cookies, but they don't ship so well, so I make breads instead.  Stollen, pannetone, pandoro, and other Christmas breads, mostly.

I frequently have recommended Bill McKibben's Hundred Dollar Holiday.  I'm a big advocate for simple Christmas celebrations with family and friends, and food and drink and maybe even games, the way Dickens described it (and before Clement Clark Moore got ahold of it).

And so now we come to Fauci, or Biden, or the Grinch, stealing Christmas.  Did nobody learn the moral of that story?

It's not like this is going to happen on Xmas morning and we're going to wake up to empty trees with nothing but lights and baubles to show it's Xmas Day.  Hallowe'en is still 18 days away (as I type).  We see this coming, to the extent that it is. We can prepare for a Xmas without store-bought items and, dare I say it, without massive post-Xmas debt.

Who needs that?

This is Striketober, after all.

'Striketober' in full swing as nearly 100,000 workers authorize work stoppageshttps://t.co/faUoavdh9t

— Raw Story (@RawStory) October 14, 2021

If we're going to strike a blow for fairness and equity in the job market, we might as well strike one for Christmas Day, too.  Are we so pitiful that if the ships from China grinch our Christmas, we'll wake up and boo-hoo around the Xmas tree?  Will Christmas not come if the stores don't provide us with everything we are desperate to buy and pile on the floor?

I think we're a little better than this, and a low-key, family oriented Christmas, even if you can't get a turkey after Thanksgiving, won't be a disaster.  The Grinch took everything, after all, right down to the last tree bauble and even the Roast Beast.  The Whos down in Whoville didn't care.  They had Christmas anyway.

Can we learn nothing from that?

Sure we can.  Make your plans accordingly, and look forward to a festive season even if the shipping is delayed and packages don't reach their destinations. Here's an idea, if you're anxious:  mail before Thanksgiving.  Or just makes lots of phone calls on Xmas Day.

If the Grinch couldn't cancel Christmas, who are we to do so?

From the messaging wizards at the @HouseGOP: pic.twitter.com/nIhC3FTP38

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) October 13, 2021

Yeah, that’s how this works.

White House Warns Supply Chain Shortages Could Lead Americans To Discover True Meaning Of Christmas https://t.co/jaz4599uI7 pic.twitter.com/xJnUF9UOir

— The Onion (@TheOnion) October 13, 2021

Well, we wouldn’t want that to happen!

Why does religion matter?

Admittedly, I need more time to explore this, but via the Mad Priest I find yet another internet article about religion and what it is supposed to do: i.e., it should, like everything else in this material world, produce something of value, and to the extent that it does, it can therefore be considered "good."

I'm tempted to say this is yet another form of Social Darwinism, but then I'd have to go off the rails of this discussion and elucidate the true conclusions of evolution. That's on my mind for reasons which will become plain in a moment, but also not entirely germane to the issues at hand; so I'll come back to it later.*

Went to bed last night looking for something to read for a few minutes, and plucked up Huston Smith's Why Religion Matters (New York, HarperSanFrancisco 2001), which I'd never finished reading. There I came across this quote, from Christopher Lasch, referring to Jonathan Edwards, the man perhaps best known for giving us the image of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Mr. Edwards was quite a subtle theologian, though, and this brief reference to him by Mr. Lasch tells us a great deal about the current popular perception of that noble (and sometimes rather dismal) enterprise:

Intellectuals [writes Smith] typically present religion as comforting people with the agreeable illusion that they are the center of the universe, the object of God's loving-kindness and rapt attention, Lasch continues. But (in a paragraph that is not easy reading but is important enough to quote) Lasch points out that it is just this illusion that the most radical form of religious faith relentlessly attacks. Thus:

"Jonathan Edwards distinquishes between a 'grateful good will'(the root of religious feeling, as he understood it) and the kind of gratitude that depends on being loved and appreciated--the kind of gratitude, in other words, that people might feel toward a creator presumed to have their interests at heart. 'True virtue,' Edwards wrote, 'consists, not in love of any particular beings nor in gratitude because they love us, but in a union of heart to being in general.' Man has no claim to God's favor, and a 'grateful good will' has be to conceived, accordingly, not as an acknowledgement of the answer to our prayers so to speak, but as the acknowledgment of God's life-giving power to order things as he pleases, without 'giving any account of his doings.' "(Smith p. 117)

I have to say several things at once, because this idea spawns so many responses. One: it sounds very much like Annie Dillard in Holy the Firm or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or (and most especially) For the Time Being. Two: it puts me in mind, too, of Bill McKibben and his book Hundred Dollar Holiday (a timely tome). Third: it puts me in mind of some work I did in seminary on the nature of faith and the material inducements we need; that's a very Protestant v. Catholic/Orthodox issue, but one still worth exploring further. And fourth, of course, it puts me very much in mind of Joel Osteen and Ted Haggard, and the "gospel of prosperity." Which brings me back to McKibben and Dillard and my senior year in seminary. All topics I hope to get back to. Somebody hold me to that, will you?

I want to say more about this now, but I'm pressed for time. This, at least, preserves that rather bracing observation by Edwards and Lasch for future discussion. Historically what intervened, of course, was Pietism; the same movement that gave Edwards his right to such emotional fervor, also went on (unintentionally, but then we all know about good intentions) to undo his view of the Creator in the name of the supremacy of emotional fervor. But that's topic no. 5. All I want to say right now is: when discussing what religion is, or is not, perhaps we first need to nail down a definitive definition of "religion."

D'ya think?


*oh, what does this have to do with evolution? Left that out, didn't I? Smith makes his discussion in the context of the clash between faith and evolution, an emblematic clash between science and religion. In brief, the idea that all believers are fundamentalist flat-earthers is false, but it's a false story perpetrated as much by non-religious observers as, by now, by religious leaders. Smith has some interesting insights into the "Darwin wars," which I also want to come back to. "Time, time, time, see what's become of me, while I looked around for my possibilities. I was so hard to please...."