At the Parking Lot This Morning or The Perfect God
by Benjamin ShenderIt is December 11. A Sunday. I work at a Mall. There are the usual assortment of stores. A Sears. A JcPenny. A Starbucks. A host of jewelry stores. A SamGoody. Etc. And this morning, early on a Sunday, the parking lot was full to the brim. When I expressed surprise, I was looked at like a new breed of previously undiscovered moron. “It’s Christmas, of course the Mall is full.” I know this. It would be kind of hard to miss after all. So why was I surprised when I should not have been? Silly me: I thought that Christmas shoppers would be at Church on Sunday morning.
But, I am not prepared to write another pointless diatribe against the commercialism of Christmas. That would be far too passé. What I will talk about is the general de-sanctifying of religious holidays. While some might think that this is the same thing, I would fain say that it is not. A commercialized religious holiday is still a religious holiday. A de-sanctified holiday is merely an excuse. This is to the point that Christmas Parties at some places of business are considered secular. While any reference to Hanukah or Ramadan would be strictly frowned upon as being politically dangerous. Kwanza is somewhat immune to this as most companies just add it on to be politically correct anyway.
Once, in Spanish class, my teacher commented on the non-religious nature of a song we were singing. When she said, “Right, Ben?” (This was an inappropriate comment that separated me from the group, by the way.) I could only stare at her and reply, “the title is Feliz Navidad.”
The Simpsons once joked that Christmas “was the time of year when people of all religious join together to worship Jesus Christ.” Although meant as a joke, perhaps, we are actually worshiping the idea of Santa Claus.
And this is a very interesting angle to take. Santa Claus gives presents. He loves everyone, unless you are naughty. And he is considered to be the personification of everything good in humanity. Once, a few years back, a little girl called into a radio station and said, “My name is Virginia. A boy at school told me that there was no Santa Claus, but my parents said there was. I know you won’t lie to me. Is there a Santa Claus?” There is a short pause as everyone listening racks their mind for a response to such a hopeless question. Luckily, the person who came up with it was on the radio, “Yes, Virginia. There is a Santa Claus, in all our hearts.”
While quite a tear-jerking story, it also helps to illustrate the point I am attempting to make. Santa Claus is the new Jesus, but a better model without all the annoying history and philosophy messing with the good points. He is a personification of good, whose engraven image is blazoned across the United States. He only wants everyone to be happy, love one another, and give most of their money to big corporations. In short, he is the perfect god for the United States.
And folks that believe in the U.S.SantaGod were indeed at church - only it’s the mall - engaged in their ceremnoy, pennance, forgiving, rapture, deliverence…
Comment by JCamasto — 12 December 2005 @ 2:03 AM
It wasn’t the radio, it was the Sun, in 1897. Dr. Philip O’Hanlon, a coroner’s assistant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, told his daughter, Virginia, to write a letter to the Sun, telling her that anything she read in the Sun was trustworthy. Francis Pharcellus Church, a correspondent in the Civil War, responded to Virginia’s question about Santa Claus’s reality with a philosophical rumination titled, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” It is the most reprinted editorial in the English language. But there was no radio show.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 December 2005 @ 8:54 AM
Damn, Jason, do you know absolutely everything that ever happened? That would make you…omniscient.
*rumble rumble*
Uh, oh, I don’t think SantaGod liked that very much…
Comment by Raku — 12 December 2005 @ 11:41 AM
No, no, I’m not omniscent.
I’m just Trivia incarnate. My brain has a fat pipe hooked up to Omniscience itself, so I can just download whatever I need at the moment. My own local storage capacity is only somewhat larger than average.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 December 2005 @ 12:21 PM
Ok, doesn’t really effect the article. But thanks. If I use that again it’ll be reference correctly. I feel smarter already.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 12 December 2005 @ 1:29 PM
De nada.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 December 2005 @ 2:29 PM
Ben,
Rev. Billy (www.revbilly.com) of the Church of Stop Shopping, and the folks over at Adbusters (.org), of Buy Nothing Day fame, agree with your observations.
Jerry Mander (In the Absence of the Sacred…Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television) also explores these themes.
And if Jason is the trivia dump, I’m the bitchy grammarian: affect is a verb; effect is a noun. Sorry for being peevish and thanks for the good post.
Rick
Comment by Rick — 12 December 2005 @ 4:25 PM
Blast. I know that. I try to keep an eye on that one because it’s one of my most common mistakes. Right next to its and it’s and there and their.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 12 December 2005 @ 4:49 PM
I saw a commercial last night with Santa and his elves going out to buy gifts, and I just went off. And I got angry because Santa was once the embodiment of kindness and giving, and his one criteria as to whether or not you got anything really was being good. Were you nice, did you try a little harder, were a decent person?
Now, giving comes from desire and consumption, and Santa is reduced to being another piece in the machine that doesn’t give a goddamn if you’re trying to be a good person, just so long as you buy something.
So let’s not say that it has gone from being about Jesus to being about Santa. Santa was always a Jesus stand-in anyway (as most saints are). Let’s say that people forgot what the names and the deeds stood for, regardless of how they are used now.
Comment by Paul Rivera — 12 December 2005 @ 9:18 PM
Santa is the iconization of consumer society, where “kindness/goodness” is demonstrated through material goods.
Comment by Somebody — 12 December 2005 @ 11:30 PM
Know your history. The Santa mythos came out of folk tales from a time when winter meant possible death. Getting “things” from those who had them, celebrating that you had enough “bounty” to maybe get through the winter alive, was no trivial matter, and had nothing to do with simple consumerism.
So, again, the icon is not the issue. It’s what the icon is becoming representative of because of who is appropriating the image. Which goes back to what Benjamin was saying, though I would say that it’s not so much the “de-sanctifying” of the holiday, as it is the fact that the holiday has come to celebrate what we really hold sacred: the idealized American lifestyle, and ourselves as hopeful inheritors of that lifestyle.
Comment by Paul Rivera — 13 December 2005 @ 12:19 PM
Either way, the icon remains sacred, and sanctified to our deepest hopes. It is only those hopes that have changed. Just like Maslow predicted–you always have problems, but as your life improves, your problems become increasingly petty. It’s no longer survival, now it’s materialism. How far we’ve come!
Yes, even agricultural life gets better. It’s taken us 10,000 years to recover from the catastrophe of the Neolithic, but we’ve finally reached the ceiling of “the best agricultural life possible,” which is still not as good as the average forager, but it’s far, far beyond the toil of a medieval peasant. Santa represents that progress.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 December 2005 @ 12:57 PM
Actually I remember reading somewhere that medieval peasants worked fewer hours per year than modern US residents. That’s right, I think it was on a site ‘Take Back Your Time’ or something. I don’t post this as any sort of correction (it’s unwise to attempt to correct a Trivia God), but conversationally, in the hope that you can confirm it, deny it, expand on it, whatever.
Excellent site, by the way.
Comment by Eric — 14 December 2005 @ 1:03 AM
Don’t know, but it would probably be close. The U.S. average is creeping up to 10 hours a day, which is long even for an agrarian life. Still, there’s more to quality of life than simply how long you toil for it. There’s creature comforts, and whether or not you’re dying of plague. Don’t get me wrong, the average American’s life sucks big, hairy donkey balls, but it’s still worlds better than what a medieval serf had to endure. I can see the whole picture of history as progress–if you conveniently forget that the majority of human history is pre-Neolithic. Then you’d see that we spent most of our existence living a lot better than we do now.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 December 2005 @ 10:30 AM