I have a friend that has been encouraging me to start a blog so I decided today would be the day. This is all a little weird to me but I guess I'll get over it. To start things off I'll post some thoughts I wrote out last night as I was researching and reading on Christmas. I have been reading The Liberation of Christmas by Richard Horsley. You should all [which is probably only one of you] go out and buy this book tonight. So here are my thoughts...
Christmas was once something beautiful, something real, something connected to the core of what it is to be human, what it means to hope, what it means to wait. Christmas was once a holiday for the forsaken, the oppressed, the despised, the peasant. Recently Christmas has been made into an event for the rich. The day after thanksgiving has almost become its own holiday of debt and injustice. The original story of Christmas was one of hope, liberation, release from domination, and one of revolution. The poet Thomas John Carlisle wrote about the song of Mary found in Luke,
At our eternal peril
we choose to ignore
the thunder and the tenor
of her song,
its revolutionary beat.
Revolution. There is now hardly any revolution associated with Christmas. We have turned Christmas into a new type of hope and liberation. The hope and liberation is now only real for places such as Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, Starbucks and the rest. They are liberated from debt, low summer sales, and "the Red". I read recently that 40% of all retail sales in the United States take place between the day after Thanksgiving and December 25. Christmas is no longer a story about revolution and liberation it has become a holiday of oppression. We are oppressed by credit card bills, expensive gifts, unhappy boyfriends & girlfriends and spoiled children. What was once a beautiful story of liberation and hope we have turned into a time of domination and oppression. Make it beautiful again. What can you do this Christmas season to make the story of hope and liberation real?
Ellie Joy
10 years ago
