The Christmas Sacrifice

Now, with holiday cheer still ringing in the air, is when it’s most fashionable for people of all races and political persuasions to complain about the steady decay of American culture. It’s now when we are most compelled to turn up our noses at humanity’s rabble, the heathens who storm the shopping malls on Black Friday like sheep out to graze, and to wax nostalgic about the vulgarization of a once-holy holiday. We Charlie Browns can cry “why has corporate culture ruined our Christmas?”

However we should appreciate that materialism, as vacuous as it may be, is but a current realization of a very ancient impulse. A Christmas of Santa Claus on Hallmark cards and shopping bags filled with presents plays out on microscale the historical human need to gather in groups, pay tithe to the powers above and celebrate a year of renewal. Shopping is sacrifice, only updated and optimized for modernity.

Almost all cultures have festivals of congregation, celebration and sacrifice. Scandinavian pagans, for example, celebrated the annual Yule holiday during Winter Solstice, where groups of village dwellers would gather, eat, dance, sing and sacrifice livestock to their god of peace and prosperity, Freyr. The Romans too celebrated the Winter Solstice. During Saturnalia from December 17 to December 23 they gathered in the square, temporarily freed their slaves and sacrificed more than one hundred oxen and sheep.

Sure, corporate Christmas isn’t imbued with the same religiosity of these festivals, but it is still a venue for fulfilling these urges – togetherness, atonement and celebration. Rather than a God who damns us for eternity, corporate Santa Claus just gives us a pile of coal; rather than performing miracles, coporate Santa just has to fit through a chimney; rather than angels, he has elves. Likewise, rather than village squares, we can congregated at Bloomingdales under the prospect of sharing and family and love and cheer and good food and wine. Holiday shopping provides us an excuse to unite with others in the same way that Scandanavian pagans did before us.

Also, unlike the Scandanavians and Romans whose hecatombs were slaughtered livestock, we jettsetters become giddy at the prospect of a different, but very much the same, annual sacrifice. We give up what is tantamount in importance, our hard-earned paychecks. The root of the word sacrifice, the Latin word sacrificium, means “sacred,” and to an America of educated consumers, perhaps little is more sacred than our money -- and we're willing sacrifice it up in the name of Christmas spirit. Yes, Christmas means getting as well as giving, but studies indicate that each year, we spend more money on giving presents than our recipient would spend on buying those presents themselves. This is the deadweight of the giving/getting Christmas dynamic. However, our willingness each year to stomach this Christmas deficit underlies a fundamental human willingness to give up that which is sacred for that which is promised, a renewed year.

So, if they wish, the disenchanted crusaders against the cheapening of the holidays can call the modern sacrosanctity of material possessions hollow and disgraceful. However, our readiness to give up our revered possessions -- our money and time and credit -- in the name of atonement and togetherness and love, ought to warm even the most ascetic hearts and ought to bring materialism to very the essence of the modern Christmas spirit.