Now it is obvious that I haven't been watching much broadcast telly this season ...because I just tonight, December 16th, noticed this advertisement. Otherwise by now, I might already have heard it for the hundredth time, and been rendered immune. And that, my friends, would have been a loss, because this really is advertising genius.
I was working on kids' gifts so it seemed appropriate to have an old classic buzzing away in the background... A Charlie Brown Christmas. And I'd just stopped to pay attention to the section I love the most… where tiny, world-wise but security-blanket dependant philosopher Linus takes the stage and tells C.B. the true meaning of the season by quoting a bit of the gospel message from the second chapter of Luke. I can hear it in my head on a continuous loop from childhood and I always hope somebody ‘gets it’ this year! At the break, this catchy tune came on … when I looked up, though I’d missed the beginning, I saw the commercial’s jingle was accompanied by pictures of a family prepping for the holidays. There was the obligatory montage of adorable kids and cute pets, cookies and lights that we’re bombarded with this time of year. I went back to what I was doing... it was all jolly and fun and background noise and then….
…and then I started listening to the lyrics. Some sly Mad Men type had done his best to push the message that Corporate Greed wants, nay needs us all to swallow...especially this most wonderful time of the end of the fiscal year…JUST... A LITTLE... MORE!
Now, the retailer is pushing it as “A little more JOY for Christmas”…and it all begins innocuously enough… kids so cute it hurts to look at them, festive decorations, giggle-inducing animal antics. This one’s really good, but you’ve seen it all before. It’s all about getting ready for the American dream holiday we Americans are supposed to be, well, dreaming about. And while it’s been decades since I had anything like a Norman Rockwell, TV Christmas-special holiday myself, I know that a lot of the season IS family traditions and the things that secular carols are about…the eggnog and lights, the family get-togethers, the secrets and surprises, the hustling and bustling. I buy into a bit of that for myself, and without a few presents to find and wrap and give, it would seem like I was missing something of the nostalgic Christmas of my own childhood memories. I try to keep a spiritual focus at the holidays, but I don’t celebrate like a monastic and ‘any reason for giving a prezzie’ is practically a life motto. I’ll also admit right here that at the end of this fiendishly-crafted advert, they add a line about ‘more hugs’ just before wrapping the whole thing up in a bright big bow of a tag-line: “just a few more little touches and a lot…more…love!” So what’s the problem? Why do I have to be so cranky and complain about this happy little ad?
Well…the first line I really noticed, was early on: “another dozen cookies, just in case the neighbors show” which is all about hospitality, of course, but the humourous overflowing of the cookies on the counter told me there was something more going on here. At this first viewing, I hadn’t SEEN the very beginning of the ad, and so I still didn’t know the sponsor, which is cleverly, silently only at the beginning and the very end. And since I hate spoilers, I’ll save the credits for later, if you don’t already know. It doesn’t really matter the retailer...it’s their message.
The next verse gets more to the point. After the family dog playing in a little more tinsel, we get “another nutcracker because the last one caused a fight…” Now it’s an established fact that nutcrackers have been causing chaos between children since Christmas 1892 when P.I. Tchaikovsky made note of it in his eponymous ballet. Just ask the Mouse King what havoc the gift of only ONE nutcracker can cause an otherwise peaceful household at the holidays. Whatever was that eccentric uncle thinking!
So sure, parents, we know you’re harried. You work hard. You take them to soccer, and ballet, and rehearsals for the school play and every other more, more, more thing in their lives. Your kids have the social calendars of Will and Kate, or a Kardashian. You’re happy to get through another traffic jam without them killing each other in the back seat! And odds are, you have an actual paying job too, which expects you to show up a few hours a month. Why, you haven’t had a moment of “me time” in weeks! The last thing you want to do at the end of the day is PARENT! So, instead of dealing with the sibling rivalry by discussing it, or giving a time out; taking the damned nutcracker for safe keeping until your little darlings can learn to SHARE (just when exactly did a nutcracker become a TOY, anyway?) or taking a page from Solomon and sawing the blasted wooden thing in two…just get ANOTHER ONE! That won’t screw up your kids. Why, you can just BUY your way out of it! If Uncle Dusselmeyer had only known, he'd have brought one for each child and saved us all a lot of trouble! We might still have a Czar in Russia!
The image that accompanied the next phrase: “another circuit breaker for my Christmas lights” was a frightening shot of an extremely dangerous electrical situation. A scene to strike terror in the hearts of firefighters and insurance adjusters alike. Funny…until the house burns down! Now we’ve all seen it, either in some sitcom or our own Christmas zeal, but my point isn’t to take the humour out of this…really, I’m up for a good laugh. Especially at the holidays. My problem with this commercial is about the EXCESS we’ve come to expect of the season...which is shown in a whopper of an outdoor light display on a smallish, ordinary house (more power/less taste seemed to be the theme) that ends this verse. And with that we’ve gotten to the root message. More… more …MORE is what we need to have Joy at Christmas!
Now the little ditty has us right where it wants us. We’re laughing, we relate. ”A few more little presents, so the stocking’s nice and stuffed, another Lego set, cause a million aren’t enough…” Aside from the accompanying nightmarish image many parents have actually lived...stepping on a carpet covered in hundreds of tiny, weapons-grade plastic Legos in the middle of the night…herein lies the real danger. Listen to the WORDS: “Another …cause a million aren’t enough!” SERIOUSLY?!? I mean, I have friends with kids with Lego addictions and there is as yet no known cure, no twelve-step program. So I get that it’s possible to actually believe that you can never have too many Legos. (It may well be the new too rich or too thin that our society knows to be unattainable!) But this isn’t just about wildly expensive tiny blocks of plastic from China invading our living spaces and causing late-night visits to the emergency room for surgical removal. This, dear readers, is much more insidious.
This is the kind of pablum we’ve fed from the high chair. Our parents, reacting to the their own folks growing up wanting in the depression and suffering through the rationing of World War II... decided their little angels would never know want. And we ate it up…more, more, more! That’s what will make us feel better, stop our crying, mend our broken hearts. CONSUME!!!!! And this generation has become even more afraid of allowing our offspring to want for anything at all! Instant gratification is ingrained in a people who incessantly depress the elevator button, scream at traffic signals and will yell at the microwave or the Keurig to HURRY UP! (Confessing here!) And the economy this corporate greed culture fostered taught us well. We became consumers in everything! Just look at us! We have to have it ALL. Every last one of the limited edition things. in every color. We’re drowning in our STUFF. Even our Art is consumed, mass-produced, trivialized! And I highly suspect that our kids’ entertainment is often written around the possible merchandising, instead of development being the other way round. We are insatiable. And it’s killing us!
And in this season of Peace on Earth, it begs the question: can’t you just see that “million aren’t enough” philosophy in the billions and trillions spent on defense…because we already have enough weapons and bombs to annihilate life on the planet, many times over…but we need MORE! More will make us safe. More will bring Peace. More is better. We need MORE. Not to mention the myriad other useless wastes of funds in government? In every financial scandal in the news. In our own personal debt crises. The answer is easy. The solution is MORE!
But back to the commercial, because we’re not finished quite yet. In fact, the point at which I began really listening, is still to come. I have no issue with a little more garland... festoon away, I say. But the line that left me frozen to the spot was: “Why stop at three wise men when the mantel fits nine!”
Now you’ve gone and done it! Before, this was about the secular Christmas, the mall Santa Claus, maybe even the Jimmy Stewart and Clarence the Angel Christmas and I could laugh about that, but now you’ve gone and hit the real Reason for the Season part, and my conscience just can’t let it go!
The argument is not one of historical accuracy here. There is nowhere, in any Biblical text, or commentary, or papyrus in any jar, anywhere that tells us definitively that there were indeed THREE potentates from the East who visited the Christ child. And while the ludicrous image of nine, redundant wise men figurines crowding the Holy Family in the tiny creche on that mantel (not to mention the fact that said Eastern dignitaries didn’t arrive until much, much later, and that we celebrate THAT on Epiphany, it’s very own holiday... a couple of weeks after Christmas) probably WAS the tipping point for me on this whole thing; this isn’t about any perceived desecration of a holy shrine! Or even aesthetics. It’s not really a religious issue for me. And in Eastern Christianity, the Magi do sometimes number as many as twelve...so it’s not even about doing the math.
This whole tradition of three, is usually attributed to the number of gifts mentioned in Matthew’s gospel: gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and so they were given three names. Melchoir, Balthasar and Caspar, back around the sixteenth century. Then in 1857, John Henry Hopkins, the rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Williamsport, Pennsylvania penned his own little Christmas ditty about THREE kings from the ORIENT, put it to music and it was set in stone. (He did graduate from General Theological Seminary, but back then, that was prestigious, not problematic.) So, while I’d personally prefer your wise men don’t arrive at the creche on December 25th; you’re free to have as many Eastern royalty or magicians or wizards or astronomers or mystics as you desire and you can call them whatever you like. But that’s not really the point here. Our Madison Avenue Magi are conjuring something much simpler and sinister than a Nativity traffic jam on your mantelpiece.
It’s about MORE!
You don’t have enough...cookies, or lights, or presents, or nutcrackers, or wise men, or patience, or time, or love and understanding, or friends, or peace of mind and you certainly don’t have enough JOY. But they will sell you...just a little more. Just one more. Just a couple more. Just some MORE. And then…
And then, dear friends….you will be right where you are now...only a little poorer, a little more frustrated, a little wearier, a little more scared, a little more jaded and disappointed and depressed, anda little less right with yourself and others and the world. Because deep down in your heart you KNOW that MORE is not ENOUGH!
It really isn’t about MORE. Not a little more, not a couple more. It is about stopping the madness! Because there will NEVER be ENOUGH. Not like that. Not material things. Not the accumulation, collection, one-with-the-most-toys wins way. Just watch one episode of Hoarders and that will become abundantly clear!
But all is NOT lost...
The hopeful truth is that we DO have ENOUGH. That we ARE enough. Just us! Imperfect, dimly lit, unfestooned, only can find two wise-men, ran-out-of-cookies us! We are enough, because God made us...just as we are!
And he doesn’t want more of our stuff. He just wants more of US. He wants us to BE more US than we can ever be in the rat-race of gathering more, more, more of the stuff the retailers are selling us ...with their hollow promises of more hugs, more love, more spirit and more JOY. They don’t care how many hugs we get, or if our neighbors show up. Actually, it’s to their advantage that we’re left wanting, and miserable, and scared, because after Christmas, they sell asprin and antacids and security systems, and a lot more stuff they need us to buy.
But all we really need for Joy at Christmas, is all around us. Each other...our families, our friends, our communities, our church...and GOD.
Remember Him. The one this holiday is really all about.
We celebrate because God gave us the one and the only gift that can ever possibly satisfy that craving inside. Because what we really crave...is HIM. Because He is LOVE. And because He loved us so very much, He gave us everything! And then, when that wasn’t enough for our insatiable appetites, He gave us His only Son. And that’s what this is really all about!
And as far as the world is concerned...there IS more.
More hopeful truth in all this. We really DO have enough….we have enough love to figure out this racial divide that threatens to rip our society asunder...the violence that terrifies us daily. We just have to start seeing each other as God’s children. As family. Each and every one of us on this planet. At least that’s the start. And He must love variety, because He made us all different, special, tall, short, fat, skinny, and every color that human skin can manage.
And as for the rest...we actually already HAVE enough. Enough ideas, ingenuity and work to be done to keep us all employed for a very long time. Enough brilliant minds to solve our medical puzzles and climate scares, if we could only stop chasing the greed of having more than the other guy, because there really IS enough for everyone. And we have enough food to feed the world, if we could figure out a way to mobilize and distribute it…but that, would take really learning that lesson about SHARING. Unfortunately, our folks just bought us another nutcracker and ended the chances of THAT.
So...if you happen to catch my now-favourite holiday commercial from the people at Walmart, promising you more JOY at Christmas...just remember...their promises are hollow, foreign-made by slave labor, will probably break by December 26th, may be toxic, could be recalled...but they are definitely NOT the way to more JOY this Christmas.
That, my friends, is in receiving the Gift that has already been given...to you, to me...to all of us. In a manger, in Bethlehem. And THAT is the way to JOY for you...and the whole world!
