First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany
"Unplugging the Christmas Machine"
Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore December 3, 2000

READINGS

In their book "Unplug the Christmas Machine," authors Jo Robinson and Jean Coppock Staeheli write about the seductive psychology of the American pattern of acquiring more and more stuff (most of which we don't really need or want) each Christmas (thanks to the Rev. Scott Alexander for this editing):

"The Christmas Machine has this power over us because it knows how to woo us; it speaks to the deepest, profoundest, and most sacred desires of the human heart. If it appeared as a monster, we would rise up and stop it. But the commercial messages of Christmas appear as promises that bring tears to our eyes. Look at the bounty we are promised by the December magazines and the glowing Christmas commercials: Our families will be together and happy...Our children will be well-behaved and grateful...Our wives will be beautiful and nurturing...Our husbands will be kind, generous, and appreciative...We will have enough money...We will have enough time...We will have fun...We will be warm...We will be safe...We will be truly loved. No wonder we stop, we listen, and we want to believe. The problem comes when we buy into the notion that what we long for can be procured by the buying and selling of goods...[we believe] that if we buy and receive more Christmas presents our inner lives will be fuller, and we will finally be safe [and satisfied] in the world...The key to unplugging the machine is knowing what you REALLY want.

Matthew 6:19-21

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Luke 12:15-21

And [Jesus] said to them, "Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." And he told them a parable saying, "The land of a rich man brought forth plentifully; and he thought to himself, 'What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?' And he said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones; and there I will store all my grain and goods.

And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry.' But God said to him, 'Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be? So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God."

SERMON

I feel like an economic traitor standing up here talking about unplugging Christmas. Once the dishes are done after the Thanksgiving feast, the news media starts anxiously reporting people's shopping behavior. Many businesses manage profitability only on what they can sell between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The frequency of the cash register's beeps composes the music of success or failure. Our downstairs neighbors in our apartment building who do mall kiosk retailing make most of their money in the last week before Christmas, with the mall taking a cut in the tens of thousands of dollars. In an economy of unsustainable growth, the advertisers plead with us on behalf of their merchants to buy, buy, buy and put off economic recession for another year.

I feel even more like a traitor to your children by suggesting parents need not satisfy their every desire. I remember my own childhood and how I felt about Christmas. My parents were constantly resisting buying us all the cool toys my sister and I saw on our television set. Christmas was payback time for all that deprivation. Each year my mother would rail against the advertisers and suggest we just forget gift giving entirely, which, of course, horrified my sister and me. After all, this was our chance to load up on loot that would have to last for the rest of the year. We wanted stuff and we wanted it wrapped and under the tree!

But if I don't speak out, I fear I'd be a traitor to more important, enduring values.

The excesses of Christmas consumerism are the most obvious symptoms of the festering disease of materialism that is destroying our planet. Cutting down forests, strip mining minerals, depleting precious oil and gas, polluting the air, soil and water all to make E-Z Bake Ovens, plastic assault rifles, knick knacks, ornaments, wrapping paper and bows that will be forgotten or discarded in a few weeks. (Speaking of waste wrapping paper, I encourage you to buy recyclable gift bags to exchange presents in Channing Hall)

We are entering the second year of our study action issue of responsible consumption. Christmas is an ideal time to be thinking about responsible consumption since it is symbolic of everything that needs to be addressed.

After all, Christmas can't be bought in a store. Perhaps Christmas means a little bit more.

Last Sunday my family went to see the latest Hollywood version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas with Jim Carrey. Reviewers have panned it but what got me motivated to see it, besides enjoying Jim Carrey's outrageous humor and facial expressions, was hearing Marla Frazier describe the Unitarian Universalist interpretation in this remake. Little Cindy Lou Who gets a prominent role in this version of the story. She develops an affection for the Grinch who lives at the top of mount Krumpit, also the location of the garbage dump. She sets out to heal his alienation from Christmas and the Who community by engineering his selection as "Holiday Cheermeister." He accepts the invitation but things do not go well, in part due to the Hollywood insertion in the story of a love interest competition between the Grinch and the mayor, one of the hardest parts of the movie to swallow. The mayor uses this moment to propose marriage to Martha May and offer her a new car, furnished by the tax payers of Whoville, if she says, "Yes." In a fit of anger and betrayal, the Grinch says:

That's what its all about isn't it? That's what its ALWAYS been about!

Gifts! Gifts, gifts, gifts, gifts.

You wanna know what happens to your gifts? They all come to me, in your garbage!

You see what I'm saying? In your garbage!

I could hang myself with all the bad Christmas neckties I've found in the dump!

And the avarice; the AVARICE never ends. "I want golf clubs, I want diamonds, I want a pony" so I can ride it twice, get bored, and sell it to make glue. Look I don't want to make waves, but his whole Christmas season is stupid!

The advertising driven gift giving bonanza is a 20th Century addition to the holiday. The authors of the book, Unplugging the Christmas Machine, discovered in their research that part of the motivation for the focus on gift giving came from trying to stave off recession after the end of the First World War. People were encouraged to buy gifts for the holiday and they responded enthusiastically. And why not? The war was over and there was much to celebrate as families were reunited. I'm sure people wanted to move on in their lives and start making happier memories for themselves and their families than the war years provided. Seeing the power of advertising at work to motivate behavior fired up the world of marketing and they've never looked back. Each year a new technique or tool of psychological manipulation gets discovered and engaged to get us to buy more.

I don't want you to get the impression that this is all the advertisers fault though they share part of the blame. We Unitarian Universalists have our hand in this too. Our progressive ideas celebrating children's natural perfection in the 19th Century and the privatization of the Christmas celebration in the home around a cut tree with candles and treats for the kids, set the direction. Not that the Christmas celebration before this was much better. The holiday was practiced in the New World as well as England and Europe as a time for a non-stop drinking binge from Christmas to New Years.

David Bumbaugh writes:

…the commercialism of the season and the secular quality of the season are equally ancient. The Saternalia was an aggressively secular celebration in which all the ordinary rules and expectations of society were overturned, in which traditional pieties were mocked and traditional virtues flouted. The Kalends Festival was dominated by conspicuous consumption. Miller quotes Libanius, a non-Christian philosopher of the fourth century, who details the extravagance with which the rich and the poor alike strove to celebrate the occasion. And as early as the fourth century, Christians were denouncing the Kalends festival for its commercialism and its lack of a concern for spiritual values. Thus, our discomfort with this ancient seasonal festival is older than Christmas itself, and elements which provoke that discomfort have not changed much over the centuries.

I struggle with critiquing the tradition of giving gifts because it is a good practice that goes back before the dawn of recorded time. Even animals like to give gifts as any cat owner knows when they get a dead bird as a present on their doorstep. Giving gifts is a wonderful way to practice non-attachment to one's possessions and communicate love. A child buying something they'd like for themselves and giving it to someone else initiates them in the enjoyment of helping another person to feel good. The ritual of buying a diamond ring as an engagement gift is an important sign a man is willing to forgo his own wants and spend his hard earned money on his future family. Giving away precious objects to downsize and simplify their lives is an important life transition for the elderly as they turn their attention to meanings that go beyond the material world.

So the problem isn't giving, so much as giving out of balance with the ecosystem, or one's values and relationships. The crux of the problem, I think, is the dysfunctional attitudes we've developed about giving gifts.

I reproduced for you in your order of service from the Unplug the Christmas Machine book, "the ten hidden gift giving rules." These were written partly in jest -- but only partly. These rules lie buried in our unconscious minds and operate to torment us during the Christmas season. Please follow along as I read them and see if they match your internal rules:

  1. Give a gift to everyone you expect to get one from.
  2. If someone gives you a gift unexpectedly, reciprocate that year (prewrapped gift stash helpful)
  3. When you add a name to your gift list, give that person a gift every year thereafter.
  4. The amount of money you spend on a gift determines how much you care about the recipient.
  5. Gifts exchanged between adults should be roughly equal in value.
  6. The presents you give someone should be fairly consistent in value over the years.
  7. If you give a gift to a person in one category (e.g. neighbor or coworker), give a gift to everyone in that category, and these gifts should be similar in value.
  8. Women should give gifts to their close women friends.
  9. Men should not give gifts to their male friends -- unless those gifts are alcoholic beverages.
  10. Whenever the above rules cause you any difficulty, remedy the situation by buying more gifts.

I wanted to make sure you take the time this morning to read these so you can break them. Now that you have them in your hand, you can talk about them with your friends and family and decide which ones you want to observe or reject. We can still give each other gifts and make them meaningful if they can come from love and not from guilt or shame that drains the spiritual benefit out of gift giving.

Changing attitudes about gift giving is just the first step on the road to recovering our mental health and vitality during this holiday season. You'll also find on your insert a list of meanings people bring to Christmas. For some the theme of peace is central to Christmas. For others spending time with family and making one's house beautiful brings them great joy. Some find the religious dimensions of the holiday central and others look forward the parties and social occasions and sharing time with friends. I hope for many of us this season is a time to reflect on our wealth and how to share it with those who need a hand. Each of us will balance our priorities differently -- yet how many of us talk to each other about what really matters? I strongly encourage each family to have a meeting and talk about what each person's priorities are. What sense does it make to search creation for the perfect gift if that gift isn't really that important to the recipient? Let's face it. We all have limited resources of time, money and energy. It only makes sense to focus our resources where they will mean the most.

One priority that is likely to need negotiation is giving gifts to children. I think we all know and have witnessed the excess directed toward children at Christmas. While material wealth gain is important to children, it is probably wiser to spread the giving out over a longer period of time and need not be so overwhelming. I've included in your insert what most kids really want for Christmas. They want to spend time with their family. The most precious commodity we have to give our children today is our time. Children can and will accept realistic expectations for gift giving. The emotional value of a gift can't be measured in dollars. It is better, I think, to focus on the intention the gift communicates: I'm paying attention to what you care about and is meaningful to you.

Because time is so precious today, more time often gets taken away from a child shopping for gifts than they get on Christmas morning when their gifts will occupy their attention. Including children in the preparation for the holiday, such as buying and decorating the tree or baking cookies and cakes, will yield more enduring memories than the final products enjoyed and consumed.

Finally, I want make a plug for developing and continuing family traditions and rituals. Last year we heard a number of them being shared in the service. Many of us have special ways we decorate our trees. Some people always open their gifts on Christmas Eve. Others always have an intergenerational gathering Christmas day with family as the Moriarty clan does in Buffalo. In one family I know, every year the father reads Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales on Christmas Eve. You can hear me continue that tradition on Christmas Eve morning this year when I read that beautiful story for you.

One of the most meaningful rituals my family developed happened while my sister and I were teenagers. We started going to Longwood Gardens in the afternoon of Christmas Day to see the Christmas displays and all the outdoor trees lit with lights after the sun went down. I can get quite sentimental remembering all the poinsettias, the warmth of the tropical plant rooms, the orchid and the bonsai tree displays, and the spectacularly ornamented trees in the conservatory.

These rituals and traditions are often much more meaningful than the piles of gifts that clutter the floor, especially for middle class adults who already have or can buy what they want and need. I couldn't tell you what I got or gave for Christmas in my teenage years, but I have vivid memories of those trips to Longwood Gardens.

The Christmas season need not be a marathon to be endured. We can take control of the holiday and shape it so that it will be meaningful to us and our families and friends. This is, after all, the Unitarian Universalist way we do things!

And as you are prioritizing your Christmas activities, I hope you will choose to spend some time here. In two weeks we have our tree trimming party and at one or more of the three, count'em, three services on Christmas Eve, particularly the special playlet we are planning for the family service.

May taking control of the holiday, awaken in us the enjoyment and spirit this holiday can bring.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.