Tis the Season
L. Penseur
July 1, 2000
Well, it's the season to be jolly, of Bing Crosby crooning, "Chestnuts roasting o'er an open fire," neighborhood competitions to develop the most garish and kilowatt-intensive house lighting display, the very refreshing beverage of hot Tom and Jerry, and breakfast with Santa. And, to round things off, the Christmas issue of some evangelical publication is out—I name no names—which deplores all of the above, decries the commercialization of Christmas, proclaims the substitution of Claus for Christ, et cetera, and calls for Christians to fall back from the beleaguered outpost of Christmas and retreat under heavy marketing fire to our trenches and foxholes around Fort Easter.
I haven't been too thrilled with the whole strategic-withdrawal-to-Easter idea since I saw my first human-sized pink inflatable bunny tied down on a lawn beneath an Easter egg tree. Zut alors, I thought. Earthquakes and brilliant flashes of light, hard-bitten veteran legionnaires fleeing for their lives, shining beings rolling around economy-sized pieces of granite, hell shaking to its foundations, and a battered, desecrated, tortured, and absolutely dead body getting up and walking out of its tomb … from this we get a pink inflatable bunny? If you can make that kind of mental, emotional, and intellectual transition, are there any kinds of transitions you can't make? Easter is not as safe as the opponents of Christmas commercialism make it out to be.
An incident in church the other day clarified another part of the problem for me. On some liturgical whim of the worship leaders, we read the Apostle's Creed. The friendly fellow leading our worship carefully explained to us that "holy Catholic church" in the creed meant not "Roman
Catholic Church" ...
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