Has Christmas Jumped the Shark*?

I combine Advent with Christmas here, Advent being for many in the United States simply the pre-Christmas shopping frenzy.

Fonzie on water skis, in a scene from the Happy
Days episode "Hollywood, Part Three of Three",
after literally jumping over a shark.  Wikipedia

A case can certainly be made that Christmas, at least in the West, jumped the shark a long time ago.  And I admit I’m part of it: yes, I have a Santa Claus Advent calendar - with cute little pockets where I faithfully place hard candies each year for visitors.

Hot dog and marshmallow and rubber duck creches (The 42 Worst Nativity Sets) delight me.

A Christmas Story long-ago replaced It’s a Wonderful Life as my favorite all-time Christmas movie.

I have gazillions of Santas . . . including a Santa jack-in-the-box, a couple of wind-up Santa toys, numerous Santa figurines of various sizes and my all-time favorite, a Santa who wiggles and dances to Jingle Bell Rock.  He sits on my desk.

I have strung popcorn for a 30-foot tree and prayed at the lighting of a Christmas tree in a town center, standing on a stage fit and lit for a rock star, where Santa’s entry overhead on a zip line was the main feature of the evening.

I’ve prayed at Wintertide in my own community, in a place where the nativity still stands on the court house square, but the main story-telling attraction is not of the birth of Christ, but Twas the Night Before Christmas.

Does all of this make it easier to confuse the medium for the message?  Probably.

Yet somehow, I am not troubled in the least by any of it.

I see baby Jesus in plastic Santas and silly movies . . . in creches made of hot dogs and crass commercialization . . . in Hallmark movies and in way too many presents under the tree.

I hope Jesus sees this not as the moneylenders busy at work, but as the joy-filled happy-birthday-party extravaganza the entry of God into real time evokes.  I sure hope so.  After all, this in Advent is the week of hope.

So has Christmas jumped the shark?  Is Jesus past his own sell-by date?  For my own part, I’m not worrying until someone dresses Jesus up in swim trunks and a leather jacket.





__________________
*Jump the shark:   is an idiom created by Jon Hein that is used to describe the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery. The phrase is also used to refer to a particular scene, episode, or aspect of a show in which the writers use some type of "gimmick" in a desperate attempt to keep viewers' interest. . . The usage of "jump the shark" has subsequently broadened beyond television, indicating the moment in its evolution when a brand, design, or creative effort moves beyond the essential qualities that initially defined its success, beyond relevance or recovery. Wikipedia

Thanksgivings Past

Over the river and through the woods, to Grandma’s house we went.  Life was good with Dad at the wheel, Mom beside him in the front, and me in back watching the world speeding by as we drove the 18 miles to Grandma’s.

In the ways of childhood, the ride seemed much longer, much farther, than a mere 18 miles.  We were crossing mountains and entering under the forest canopy, curving first one way then the other, to make our way back from our city house into my Dad’s childhood, heading “out home”.

As an only child, I could barely contain my excitement at getting to see the cousins again.

The food was the food – plenty and good and hot.  So many years later, I have yet to master my Grandma’s skill at getting everything to the table hot.  I mourn that it’s too late to ask her how she did it.

And in our family, long before the retail merchants caught on, Thanksgiving was always the immediate segue into Christmas.  Our last gathering before the big holiday, on Thanksgiving we would draw names for our gift exchange, some of us secretly making trades: you got your Mom?  Oh no!  Of course, I’ll trade with you!

And I’m pretty sure it was on Thanksgiving when I cooked up the ill-fated scheme to have cousin Doug play Santa Claus for his younger sister Lisa, who still believed.  Ill-fated because Doug chickened out at the last minute (or maybe he planned it that way all along; with Doug, you can never tell).  I was probably about 11 at the time, so my concocted costume required lots of imagination – red tights and pillow-stuffed sweat shirt, black boots and a home-made cotton-ball beard looked much more like Santa in my imagination than in real life.

Because Doug bailed, as the creator of the costume, of course it fell to me to jump in, and jump in I did.  And of course, my loving family would memorialize my humiliation with photographs snapped just at the moment when little Lisa asked in her child’s soprano, Why is Beth dressed up like Santa Claus?

I wish I could tell 11-year-old Beth not to sweat it, we were making memories.

Panning Rise of the Guardians

Santa Clause May Not be a Pacifist, but the Easter Bunny Is!   (Actually, I think Santa Claus is too.)              

There’s a new movie set to be released Thanksgiving week called Rise of the Guardians.  It features an animated Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, Sandman, and Jack Frost as the ‘guardians’ of the happiness of the children of the world.

At the risk of entering the saga in the role of Scrooge, I admit that (a) while I love adventure flicks, (b) the previews of this movie bother me greatly.

I am not above some gratuitous violence in a movie, but this is a children’s movie and it uses children’s icons.

Icons are just that: symbols of something.

Santa Claus, derived from a variety of historical and imaginary figures, has his origins in Saint Nicholas, with the gift-giving tradition arising from stories about his many and secret gifts to the poor.

The Easter Bunny probably arises from pagan observances incorporated into Christian practices in celebration of Easter and the resurrection, the rabbit or the hare and the egg long having been symbols of life itself.

In Rise of the Guardian, Santa Claus is a sword-wielding warrior (modeled by the author on James Bond) and the Easter Bunny throws egg bombs and a “mean boomerang” in the battle against evil.

The problem is this: the icons of Santa and the Easter Bunny, distinctly Christian for centuries, are symbols of the nativity, the herald of peace among people, peace being specifically understood to include justice and care for the poor; and Easter is the defeat of death and the victory of life, achieved not by violence, but by sacrifice.

Mythologies teach us something.  There are important lessons brought by these icons:  care for the poor, the blessing of giving, the understanding of Jesus' advent as a gift for all humanity, God cares for children, humility as a way of life, life itself as divine gift, the certainty of the resurrection promise, to name but a few.  The James Bond lesson that the ends justify the means is a problem.

The Christian tradition recounts the battle of good and evil and the triumph of good.  These icons bear witness to that story.  It is the story of life, of courage, and of sacrifice as the ‘tools’ Jesus uses to bring about the triumph of good.

A sword-carrying Santa and a bomb-throwing Easter Bunny?

Not Good News.