2007 SERMON LIST

Rev. Ann C. Fox
(508) 992-7081
RevAnnFox@aol.com

Unitarian Universalist
Society of Fairhaven

A ‘Green’ Holiday Season

a sermon for simplifying the holidays
by Rev. Ann C. Fox

December 2, 2007

Note: A reading is attached, which you might like to read first.

          I am all set for Christmas because I have in my freezer a Christmas pudding and two heavily fruited Christmas Cakes, one for me (since Leo has no appreciation for it whatsoever!) and one for coffee hour here. When I made a short trip to England in September, I said to my sister, Joy, “It has been a short and sweet trip but I do so wish it could have been closer to Christmas so I could get my favorite foods.”

She responded, “Oh, you can. Let’s go get them.” I was amazed to find that in September not only were Christmas puddings and cakes available but so were mince pies and other traditional Christmas foods. Joy told me that her husband takes a piece of Christmas cake with his lunch every day. These days you can have the Christmas cake with or without marzipan and hard royal icing. Have it your way is the motto! In my youth, these foods were special and only for Christmas; they are also very rich, high in fat and sugar, and since everyone is talking about the battle of their bulge, what’s going on? Isn’t this overindulgence? These are the wages of affluence—overindulgence and a loss of special celebration. You can see that in overindulgence, we are not alone here in America! Long ago, only the Lord of the Manor used to be able to overindulge in this way. Have we become the Lord of the Manor?[1] Is it desirable?!

How did we get to this point in our cultural development? It really began in the dawn of human consciousness, which likely had a natural orientation to celebration. We were made for celebration! In a way, our Sunday services are a celebration of the spiritual aspect of our nature. In ancient times, most of the cultural celebrations revolved around seasons and harvests and the gods associated with them. There was precious little time to pause after the end of the harvest and before the planting. In ancient Roman times, the Saturnalia was a week-long feast after the harvest where everyone overindulged in food and wine. In the middle of the Saturnalia was December 25^th, which was the winter solstice. At this time also was the popular Mithra cult of the sun god, originally from Persia. In the northern lands were the Norse Yule celebrations.

When the Roman Empire was beginning to be Christianized in the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine built the Vatican on the hill where the Mithra cult had its main temple. How was it possible to get the people to give up their pagan celebrations? They turned them into a calendar of feasts of saints and December 25^th was declared to be the birth of Jesus. We have no idea when the birth of Jesus really was and it was certainly not important to know until the fourth century. Even into the Middle Ages and beyond, riotous pagan customs continued with reveling men dressed as women and women as men. (McKibben, p.22) When people lived as virtual slaves on the estates of Lords, Christmas was a time to reverse the social order and thus peasants lorded it over their masters. The Lords let this go on to humor the peasants a few days in the year. Our Puritan ancestors took a dim view of such behavior and tried to stop all wanton behavior in New England like they had not been able to stop it in old England. “For a century in New England, revelers faced a fine for [a riotous] ‘keeping of Christmas.’” (McKibben, p.23) As cities grew and Puritan influence gave way to civic government, the middle classes grew afraid of the riotous behavior of some of the working people, who were often without work in winter and formed into groups of marauding gangs that made cities and towns unsafe at night, even in one’s own home. There were reports of what we now call “home invasions.” The movie “The Gangs of New York” illustrated well this phenomenon. Urban gangs today have their roots in these times.

In an attempt to change this negative behavior, “…more or less self-consciously, a group of upper-class New Yorkers set out to reinvent the holiday, an effort that proved to be of far more successful and long-lasting importance than the earlier Puritan effort to stamp out the celebrations entirely.” (McKibben, p. 25) This was the 1800’s, an immensely creative time that gave us Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and many Christmas stories. But it was a wealthy, retired professor, Clement Clarke Moore, who began the tradition of what we now know as Santa Claus. He based it on the Dutch tradition (and legend from Turkey) of an extremely pious St. Nicholas of the third century. Professor Moore wrote the poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” which we now know as “The Night Before Christmas.” Unlike the tall, slender, saintly-looking St. Nicholas, he was a “right jolly old elf with twinkling eyes, rosy cheeks, and the famous shaking belly.” (p. 27). (And don’t let us forget the flying sleigh and reindeer.) And almost in the twinkling of Santa Clause’s eye, Christmas was changed forever from the solemn observance of the Puritans to the gift-giving extravaganza of our current Christmases. I am a little disappointed about all this because I was of the impression that an Englishman, Charles Dickens, invented Christmas as we know it! As Americans were creating their Christmas to fit its culture, Europeans were shaping it to fit theirs. And Unitarian Charles Dickens was shaping the English tradition with his A Christmas Carol, but Christmas did not include Santa Claus, at least at that time.

American Unitarians had quite a hand in shaping the modern Christmas tradition. “Unitarian minister, Edmund Hamilton Sears wrote the carol, ‘It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,’ the first carol with a social-ethical message unheard of at the time. ‘Peace on earth and good will,’ people said, ‘just the sort of thing you would expect from a Unitarian.’” Another Unitarian, John Bowring wrote “Watchman , Tell Us of the Night”; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. In East Lexington, Massachusetts, the Rev. Charles Follen brought the first Christmas tree into a New England church and no doubt people whispered about those pagan Unitarians celebrating with greens! James Pierpont wrote “Jingle Bells.” (Quest, Journal of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, Nov. 2007, p.5) The industrial revolution gave way to the commercial revolution. Capitalism and advertising combined to create desires in the populace as never before. Poor people reached for the advantages of the more affluent and poured these desires into a so-called abundant Christmas.

The point is that people create and re-create their traditions to suit the time in which they live, from ancient harvest revels, to Christian piety, and finally to the consumer and materialistic culture we see today. But sometimes we find that our current thinking and traditions are out of step with what is needed. In the reading, we heard Bill McKibben say that even as we continue to indulge our wants, we have outgrown what we have created and the time is long overdue to make conscious changes. He tells us that in the giving and the getting, we have lost the joy and the potential spiritual grounding of the season.

The most insidious practice of the culture is with children’s advertising. When a new children’s cartoon character is created, the advertising world aims at children who then clamor to get what is marketed to them on the heavily advertised toys. Children rarely know to do what we do: hit the “Mute” button or surf to Animal Kingdom while the advertisements are on (and then have an argument with your partner who has caused you to miss a critical part of your favorite program!).

Religious denominations and ecology-concerned organizations across the country are urging us all to reclaim a more joyous and simple Christmas without the excessive materialism. This doesn’t mean we can’t give and receive gifts. It means we begin the slow but steady change to a more eco-friendly and thoughtful gift-giving Christmas. McKibben suggests that we make as many gifts as we can. If you have little time or inclination, the gifts should be at least bought with an awareness of sustainable living: locally made, reduced packaging, or at the very least recyclable. One person asked a friend to give her in canned goods what he would have spent on a gift and then she donated the food to the Shepherd’s Pantry! Our Green Sanctuary group is selling such things today as this knitted bag, rosemary plants, and more, which will make useful, delightful, sustainable, and inexpensive gifts. The Old Thyme Holiday Faire that we will have in our Parish House next Saturday will have lots and lots of such wholesome gifts that will also support our church and local artists. I do ALL my Christmas shopping at our Church Holiday Faire each year. If we make even one change each year, all of our single changes will add up to a whole lot of changes.

A major step towards change is telling all our family and friends that you want to simplify your Christmas and give and get only gifts that are earth-friendly. I told you some time ago that one of my friends who comes from a very large family said that her family has had the practice for decades now of buying one gift for the name of the family member that was drawn out of a hat for her.

By our new giving and getting practices and what we tell our friends and family about a simplified and sustainable holiday we are creating a new sustainable reality that is nothing less than planting the seeds of massive mind change. And we will reap far more joy from our holiday celebrations if the earth and all its creatures are part of the true spirit of Christmas. Our seventh principle, which is to care for the interdependent web of which we are a part calls us to cultivate this new way of doing Christmas. May we simplify Christmas that becomes more enriched by relationships than things and more filled with wholesome joys than toys.

Reading from:

Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyful Christmas
By Bill McKibben, New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1998

            The Christmas we now celebrate grew up at a time when Americans were mostly poor, mostly lived with extended families, mostly worked with their hands and backs. It’s no wonder that piles of presents felt different, that rowdy noise sounded different. The Christmas that was invented in the 1840s was fairly flexible: people could change the size of their presents as the nation grew richer, for instance. But more and more, that old Christmas finally feels played out. We’ve changed too much, and if we feel harassed by Christmas, that’s why. It’s not that Christmas has changed, it’s that we have….

            How are we different from the people of 1840, the people who were alive when the home-bound, gift-giving, child-centered Christmas settled across most of America….? The world looks and feels different to us than it did to those five or six generations ago….

            The reason to change Christmas is not because it damages the earth around us, though surely it does…it is not because it represents shameful excess in a world of poverty, [though it does],…--the reason it might be useful to change Christmas is because it might help us get at some of the underlying discontent in our lives…and maybe [make] our whole lives…healthier in the long run. 

© The Rev. Ann C. Fox

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