By JOANNE SADLER BUTLER
A happy accident of the commercial Christmas (ahem, “Holiday”) season is it pushes the detritus of Halloween decorations off the big-box retailers’ shelves. This pleases me, and should please you as it closes the door to what is now America’s annual celebration of a culture of death while opening the door to our celebration of life, represented by Christ Incarnate of the Virgin Mary.
Unless you live in a suburb populated with lots of kids, you may have missed the morphing of Halloween from a simpler time when children dressed up in cast-off clothes and went door-to-door seeking candy — to one where homeowners try to outdo each other in ghoulish decorations, where the winner is the one with the worst taste.
A late-October trek through the suburbs of Omaha exposed me to front lawns made up to look like crumbling cemeteries (with family names on the Styrofoam tombstones!), fake decomposing heads, hands and/or feet, a wreath on a door made of silky black ribbon bespangled with little silvered plastic skulls, and (for me the worst) a plastic glow-in-the-dark human skeleton trapped in a cage and hung from a tree.
I could hear my mother’s voice in my head saying, “You mean people paid money for this junk?” Yes, Mom indeed they did.
Meanwhile, I wonder what the Communist Chinese workers (you know all this junk came from China) thought of the American buyers of plastic skeletons encased in plastic cages.
Clearly, this is a marketing ploy by the big retailers aimed at American children, to boost their sales during the slack period that begins with the end of the back-to-school season (early September) and the start of the Christmas selling season (currently November 1).
Some see this as a harmless exercise, kids pretending to be ghouls and decorating their homes in ghoulish and garish ways.
Others might celebrate this as a mainstreaming of a multicultural event: the Mexican “Day of the Dead,” which has its roots in pagan Aztec culture. Some Catholic churches with significant Latino membership have adopted parts of the “Day of the Dead” rituals into their activities for All Souls Day.
But hanging a plastic skeleton in a cage on a tree is a long way away from my modest ethnic tradition, which involved cleaning one’s family gravesite on November 2.
If you’ve stuck with me this far, no doubt you’re wondering what this has to do with Christmas. It’s because celebrations for the “Day of the Dead” have moved from a simple remembrance of souls who have gone before us to an embrasure of death as a happy and fun time, replete with candied sugar skulls for the little ones to munch on. Welcome to the “fun side” of the Culture of Death.
Christmas, by contrast, is a celebration of the Culture of Life. Yes, the same big-box stores relentlessly try to push us to buy holiday junk, and overspend on toys, clothes, and gifts, but the foundation of the holiday is the birth of Jesus Christ.
As Christians we’ve known this since we were children, but we need to move this knowledge from its resting place in back of our brains to the front — where we can use it to evangelize.
It can be as simple as saying “Merry Christmas” to someone (as a little reminder that December 25 is Christmas Day).
Or doing an act of charity for a distressed friend or colleague in Jesus’ name.
Or an acknowledgment for the people you interact with regularly but seem ignored; who are treated more like a machine than a human being (e.g., the barista at your usual coffee shop, the security guard in your office building).
Inviting a lonely friend or colleague to Christmas Mass, or if that seems too much, to a Christmas dinner at your home.
For those for whom Christmas is a difficult time (e.g., the anniversary of a death), offering to pray not just for them but with them — to help them to reach out to Jesus in their suffering.
Or going to a nursing home/rehab center, where the elderly are warehoused and forgotten by their children, and visiting — and praying — with someone.
Naturally I am not encouraging you to break your employer’s rules about interactions with employees. Respect the rules and use your common sense when it comes to evangelizing in the workplace.
But once you’ve moved the Incarnation of the Lord to the front of your brain, and made it a part of how you deal with your family, friends, and fellow human beings, something wonderful will happen. Your worldview will change.
You will see endless opportunities to spread the Good News, to remind people (in word and deed) that our God chose to become one of us, a human being, to suffer all the pain and frustrations of life on Earth, and ultimately died for our sins. He is the Living God, the God of Life.
Make this Christmas season the one where you move the Incarnation to the front of your brain, and go out to give the best gift of all, the Lord of Life.
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