Christmas

Authorized by narratives in two of the Gospel books of the Christian Bible, Matthew and Luke, and providing a prequel to New Testament Christology, Christmas celebrates the coming of God to earth through the birth of Jesus Christ. It is Christianity's second greatest festival, after Easter, and during this season the Church becomes a theater of incarnation. The apostle Paul claimed that Christ born in Bethlehem can still be located on earth: The Church as the body of Christ is the continuing extension of the incarnation.

A full account of Christmas requires a theological ear for what is irreducibly religious but also a sociological imagination for its holy day/holiday presence in lived Christianity, where the categories [Page 217]of sacred and profane are continuously scrambled, and an anthropological appreciation for the formation of a distinctive Christian material culture inside the Church and its exuberant and uncontrollable migrations beyond it. Already in its early centuries, the Church set Christmas amid the winter solstice, a time long given to Roman celebrations, raising the question whether Christianity would indelibly mark material culture or whether the long history of the pagan festival would undermine Christian intent.

Christmas displays the risk of incarnation. As festival spins God into every matter, Christianity becomes complicit in forces it cannot control. Religious props soon enough are embraced and embellished on every worldly stage. Celebrations of Christmas migrate from great cathedrals to their public squares and markets and, later, to homes and villages—a multivalent incarnational extravagance.

Religious traditions always reflect a tension between original intention and contemporary realization. While sacred texts authorize religious festivals, they do not control their evolution. Embedding Christmas in a Christian liturgical year, preceded by the four-week preparatory season of Advent, was meant to situate it in sacred time and space. But narratives, characters, motives, and their ritualizations do not stay put as enthusiastic crowds carry them, along with the Christ child, to ever new sites. Hence, many Christians over the years have questioned whether Christmas should be staged at all, arguing that sensuous delight more likely distracts from rather than carries spiritual presence. Many have questioned whether the avalanche of material culture (presents, wrapping, toys, feasting, Santa Claus, family, kitsch and carols, and trees and lights) has buried the original significance.

Christian theologians assert that a festival of incarnation reaffirms that God's creation is good, that Christmas balances the emphasis on the death of Christ, that it carries the good news that God wants to be present on earth, in the midst of the human condition. But many, inside and outside Christianity, lament as inevitable the commodification of culture and religion and now claim that Christmas has reached its apogee as a sacrament of consumer culture, with global capitalism rather than Christianity as the host. But to dismiss Christmas as the triumph of consumer capitalism over religion as its rival worldview misses too many of the meanings of Christmas and seems to accept the values of the market as the final stage of human evolution.