Crissmas

I am increasingly of the opinion that we overdo Christmas. The secular world, in its drive for getting more and more things and keeping the economy afloat (as though buying trivial fluff is an obligation) has, no doubt in my mind, hijacked Christmas. But even among Christians, I believe we've become too much into the process and not nearly enough into the real point of the Holiday.

That real point is the birth of Christ. Cards and gifts are fine, but they kind of miss that point. I mean, shouldn't we be giving gifts and keeping in touch with family and friends all the time? If we're only doing that around Christmas then the whole thing strikes me as, well, shallow, even desperate. Christmas slowly becomes a backdrop; I believe that the most honest reason the Charlie Brown Christmas special had become so classic is that it puts the Nativity front and center and, properly, makes the froth the unimportant background.

I don't intend this to knock gift giving and celebration. What brings this on is an article I read this morning. You may find it here:

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/cs-lewis-lost-parable-meaning-christmas?fbclid=IwAR1JjLGWW4g8pfcUDAzxiiEe89PqIrETKzUEhxsyfRrZpNf2sB_QZyhI5y8

If we do things without meaning, then the doing, of course, becomes meaningless. I fear we are headed that way with Christmas, and I wonder if it might be better if the secular world did not celebrate it at all than to celebrate it shallowly. Christians should not do that simply as a matter of their Faith.

Starting Black Friday Sales on Thanksgiving Morally Wrong

Fortune Online has proclaimed it: Macy's, the famous New York City department store, has 'thrown down the Black Friday gauntlet'. The store has announced that it will open at 6 PM Thanksgiving evening for the sake of the Thanksgiving Friday madness. Many other retailers are sure to follow.

This is a prime example of why unfettered capitalism, of why a completely free market, is on this Earth a moral wrong. Forcing, yes, forcing, people to work on holidays, outside of essential services, is an affront to their human dignity. And please don't bother about trying to argue that no one is being forced. Most of Macy's, and Target's, and Toys-R-us, and Sears employees, most likely a significant majority of them anyway, need their jobs. They have little option but to work at such absurd times when the powers that be say they must. Further, don't go on about them just getting other jobs. That ain't so easy, folks. Certainly it isn't so easy as the laissez-faire academics (who live in an idealist, abstract, and therefore unworldly, paradise) want us to believe. The world isn't perfect. Neither then will be the application of the theories of its denizens, no matter how good they look on paper.

Which is why some government regulation of the markets is good and necessary. There would be nothing wrong with a reintroduction of something like the old Blue Laws, used to prohibit nonessential services from being performed on major holidays anyway (or absurdly early on the days following them). People need time off, and the people who demand those folks' time need to reevaluate their needs. This includes more than the big shot business owners. It includes the selfish buyers who want what they want when they want it, and consideration of their fellow man be damned.

The Catholic Church has the right word for it: consumerism. At its extreme, it is a moral evil. People simply do not need everything they think they need. They certainly don't need it at the expense of another citizen's well deserved relaxation, or their time with family and friends. Your new big screen TV can wait until tomorrow, or the next sale, and if you don't get it at all, well, poor baby. Your life must indeed be awful.

If you want to talk responsibility, then let's talk about man's inhumanity to man and go from there, because responsibility doesn't begin with market forces. All too often they merely stomp responsibility and, in fact, our obligation to others. Obligation is not inherent in amassing goods.