This year was a record. The first Christmas carol played in Marks & Spencer (Kensington) was actually the week before Halloween. It was something like Hark the Herald Angels Sing, so not even an Advent carol, but something squarely for Christmas Eve or later. Christians are fairly hardened to the appropriation of the feast by a secular culture, but if the retail sector is going to make us bored of Christmas carols way before Christmas, this is not just cultural appropriation, it’s actually stealing Christmas. Like the Grinch, only for commercial gain.
The ultimate doom-scenario invoked on the BBC was that it could affect people’s Christmas by making it more difficult to get tech products to put under the tree. That scared everyone.
Both M&S and John Lewis have brought forward their Christmas advertisements by a fortnight in response, we are told, to popular demand from customers who want, according to an M&S spokeswoman, their Christmas this year to be more “magical” than ever. And according to both of them, customers have started their Christmas shopping early and will have most presents bought in November – full price! Before, in other words, the sales season starts the fortnight before Christmas. And, unnerved by a possible shortage of turkey, people are ordering theirs from early November.
The John Lewis Christmas ad now features an alien girl who lands on earth just in time for Christmas and is introduced to light-up Christmas jumpers, snow and mince pies by a nice boy. Funnily enough, she never quite gets round to pondering a Nativity scene. But that’s the contemporary festive season … always Christmas and never Advent; always the side-effects of the feast, never the main event. Christmas is the ultimate commercial imperative. During the difficulties with hauliers and transport from the Continent in October and the Brexit-related difficulties about getting goods from France, the ultimate doom-scenario invoked on the BBC was that it could affect people’s Christmas by making it more difficult to get tech products to put under the tree. That scared everyone.
And with the same grim efficiency, the season will switch off as unnaturally as it came on. By Christmas most people are Christmassed out so they may maintain the festive momentum until New Year’s Day, but after that they’re over it, right in the twelve days of Christmas.
How do we have a chance of doing Advent when the waiting season has effectively been abolished, and the trees and decorations are up in November?
So, how do we have a chance of doing Advent when the waiting season has effectively been abolished, and the trees and decorations are up in November – this year again, sooner than ever? It takes an heroic effort to be in an Advent mindset when everyone else is wearing their premature illuminated jumpers with penguins on. But it means shutting out the premature festivities, consciously following the readings during Advent, maybe having our own Christmas wreath, with candles that are only lit one by one until the last is lit on Christmas Eve. Christians have to fight for Christmas because it’s being smothered out of existence by the retail sector plus hospitality. We can remind them both that The True Meaning of Christmas involves a wait and a journey and only then a gift. Right now, we’ve arrived before we’ve travelled anywhere, let alone to Bethlehem.
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